... over. curious if the chaos-experiments group in your sample also had decent contract testing, or if chaos was the only thing keeping them honest? Comment from Nolan Vu(@nolan_vu): The pattern you described in months 1-6 vs. post-scale is exactly what kills companies that had real traction. The debt doesn't feel expensive until the moment you need to move fast again, and by then refactoring costs more in time than the original build did. From ... ... than twice in a month, automate the check. Tangible action: Add a pre commit hook that scans for common mistakes. No hardcoded API keys. No console.log in production code. No missing try/catch on database calls. 5. Architecture review: External eyes