On: Using TODO For Everything

[palata]

To me, TODOs are the equivalent to keeping thousands of tasks in a growing backlog. It just adds noise for stuff that probably won't be addressed ever. And if it is addressed, chances are that it will be from a new task. Just forget it! If it's important, it will come back on its own.

I just don't write TODOs in my code, as I have never seen a useful TODO in a codebase... The worst being "TODO: improve this". Sounds like a way to say "I wrote shitty code, I know it, please merge it anyway", which is completely useless IMO.

[haswell → palata]

> Sounds like a way to say "I wrote shitty code, I know it, please merge it anyway", which is completely useless IMO.

This is not a TODO issue, this is a merge criteria issue. TODO and its variants are only as useful as the process enforced surrounding their use.

If a dev team agrees that code can't be merged until certain types of TODO-variants are addressed, then the comment may be useful.

But of course, if no such process exists, they may not be useful. But that's a team/process issue, not a fundamental problem with using TODO comments.