It was a Thursday afternoon when the Teams message came in. A bug in production. A date formatting issue causing checkout to fail for users in certain timezones. Small bug, real impact: the payment flow was broken for roughly 8% of users. The fix took twelve minutes. A single condition, a timezone offset, a hotfix deploy. Everyone was relieved. The PM sent a thumbs up emoji. The on-call engineer closed the ticket. Six months later, that same timezone logic had been copy-pasted into four other places across the codebase. Each with its own slight variation. Each slightly wrong in a different way. The bug that took twelve minutes to "fix" ended up costing the team three days of a proper refactor, plus two additional incidents in the meantime. That's the hidden cost of "it works." TL;DR Quick fixes feel like speed. They are actually deferred cost and the interest rate is brutal.…