CodeQuality
Post #4643 · source on Telegram
When //DELETEME beats //FIXME and //TODO in the Technical Debt Olympics
Description
The meme shows a photo of an awards podium with three anonymous developers standing on the 3-2-1 steps holding small gold trophies. Above the image, large black text reads "Top worst things devs do". Super-imposed code-comment strings label the contestants: the person on the lowest step (number 3) is tagged "//TODO", the middle step (number 2) is tagged "//FIXME", and the highest step (number 1) is tagged "//DELETEME". The joke ranks common in-code comment markers by how much long-term pain they create, implying that leaving "//DELETEME" is the most egregious, "//FIXME" is slightly less bad, and "//TODO" is merely third-place in generating technical debt and code quality problems
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//DELETEME wins gold because in a 10-year-old monolith, deleting code is just eventual consistency between courage and regret
The real achievement is when you find a //DELETEME comment that's been in production since 2015, protecting a critical business logic everyone's afraid to touch because the original author is now a VP at a FAANG company
The real tragedy isn't the //DELETEME winning first place - it's that we all know these comments have been in production longer than most of the current team's tenure. At least //TODO implies future intent; //FIXME suggests awareness of brokenness; but //DELETEME? That's a developer's passive-aggressive love letter to the next poor soul who inherits the codebase, essentially saying 'I know this is terrible, I know it shouldn't exist, but I'm shipping it anyway.' It's the technical debt equivalent of leaving a loaded gun with a note saying 'please dispose of safely' and walking away
DELETE ME taking gold: the ultimate cockroach of codebases, surviving refactors, reviews, and regime changes
At scale, //TODO becomes a distributed lock that serializes progress across teams, while //DELETEME is our garbage collector - with a 36‑month GC pause
Career progression in code comments: //TODO becomes a roadmap epic, //FIXME becomes an incident ticket, and //DELETEME turns out to be the load‑bearing comment keeping the monolith up