TODO Or To Not TODO

I don’t like TODOs.

I can concede they have some benefits, I often use them when I’m working on a thing to indicate stuff I still have to finalise in Draft Code. They’re short-lived indicators of open branches in the code, or things that need to be updated when other things are changed. They’re reminders of things left to be done and for early reviewers to get a sign of things that are still in progress so they don’t waste time on reviewing something.

But they’re technical debt.

Once a project hits a certain amount of TODOs they become noise, eg if you look at a list and there’s 60 TODOs which ones are important?

They go stale.

Once they’re old enough that you’ve forgotten about them, or if they were written by another person, you don’t know if the comment still applies to the code or not without looking at the code. It might have been left in by accident.

You write them above code that you subconsciously know you’re never come to come back and fix.

At that point they’re TODON’Ts.