not exactly but doing more research does lower technical debt. there are diminishing returns for research and research costs you time that takes away from customer feedback. though, LLMs truncate the time required to do basic research by a lot, so it's something i almost always do now.

with both (1) and (2) it feels more like art than science and historically i've leaned on my intuition which is hard to share with others. that's why i need to write about it - there's probably some kind of guide one can use without all the pain required to build intuition.

we often say bad code has a smell but these dimensions of product/feature development can also smell. in either case there are probably rules for odor fighting that i haven't bothered to articulate.