When GitHub sees your //TODO comment and silently looks away

A //TODO is basically a time capsule - by the time someone opens it, the author’s LinkedIn says “ex-founder,” the framework’s EOL, and the comment has quietly become a core SLA

After 15 years in the industry, I've learned that TODO comments are just breadcrumbs we leave for our future selves to discover during the post-mortem of why that critical edge case wasn't handled. The real tragedy isn't the TODO itself - it's the git blame showing it's been there since 2019 with 47 commits that carefully worked around it

The real tragedy isn't the TODO comments themselves - it's that grep-ing your codebase for '//TODO' returns 847 matches, 600 of which are from developers who left the company 3 years ago, 200 are now impossible to implement due to architectural decisions made since, and the remaining 47 are yours from last sprint that you've been successfully avoiding during every standup by saying 'I'll get to that next.'

//TODO is the write-only API to GitHub Issues - priority: Eventually, SLA: heat death, assignee: Future You

TODOs: scaling debt horizontally without ever needing Kubernetes for orchestration

//TODO is an append-only log; 'issues' is the compaction step we never schedule