Topic: Technical Debt

Three AI coding tools, three config files, all slowly disagreeing with each other and with the code. This is how we got down to one source of truth the robots and the humans both read.

Ever opened a repo, spotted an ancient dependency version, and felt your motivation quietly exit the building? That was me, staring at our client still running on TanStack Query v3.

Here’s the (mostly human) story of how I dragged it to v5 and what it taught me about keeping a codebase clean.

APIs need to stay stable even as the systems behind them keep changing. Each version becomes a contract that cannot move, while data models and requirements evolve around it.

Keeping everything working without slowing development is harder than it seems, and common approaches often break down once incremental changes start to accumulate.