Orchestration Debt Appears Before Model Debt

# Orchestration Debt Appears Before Model Debt

Model quality matters. But in many systems the first expensive form of debt is orchestration debt.

That debt accumulates when teams stack tools, prompts, retries, and conditional branches without a clean operating model. The system keeps shipping, but nobody can explain the full path from input to action without reading source code or reconstructing logs.

## The warning signs

- retries copied across flows without shared logic
- fallback paths that contradict the main workflow
- unclear ownership of tool failures
- prompts that encode business policy implicitly

## Why it becomes expensive

Orchestration debt spreads operational uncertainty. Every new feature inherits unclear behavior from the one before it, and debugging time rises faster than product capability.

## A better rule

Treat workflow design as architecture, not glue code. If the flow is critical, it deserves explicit state, explicit transitions, and explicit human checkpoints.

## Bottom line

Many teams do not need a different model first. They need a clearer system around the model they already have.