If your Salesforce team feels like it’s wading through treacle, technical debt is often the hidden tax you’re paying. In this video, I break down what technical debt actually means in a Salesforce org: those quick, short-term decisions that feel efficient in the moment, but rack up “interest” later as slower delivery, brittle automations, messy dependencies, and higher future costs. The dangerous part is it rarely blows things up overnight—it accumulates quietly until even small changes become painful and expensive. I also explain anti-patterns—the common planning and build mistakes that create debt in the first place—and why avoiding technical debt starts with avoiding these anti-patterns. I split them into non-technical (like skipping exec alignment on CRM goals, ignoring enterprise architecture, or running an overly aggressive release program that neglects nonfunctional requirements) and technical (like overly complex automations across Flow/Apex, data model issues like field sprawl and skew, tangled validation rules/formulas, compliance risks like GDPR/PCI/HIPAA, and risky profiles/permissions without moving toward permission set groups). Finally, I cover remediation: manual metadata reviews don’t scale, so I talk about domain-specific, agentic AI tooling like Metalligence for visibility into org health, dependencies, risky design, and change impact—while still emphasizing that architectural thinking and human judgment remain central.