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This is misleading advice. Most linters can be configured to fail upon detecting a 'TODO'.

I make liberal use of TODOs when developing, typically for reminding myself to e.g. localize a string I've hardcoded during prototyping or to refactor kludgy code.

A pre commit git hook gets triggered to run the linter when I attempt to commit which helps avoid the possibility of adding code containing 'TODOs'. Obviously I can just add the '-n' flag to not trigger hooks, but this requires intention.

In short, using TODOs appropriately is a massive boost to productivity and the alternative is either to just do those random tasks that pop into your head during the course of writing code or to just hope that you remember to do it later.



Combine the two: I always leave a link to a ticket with my TODOs. An improvement would be to also use a commit hook or linter to enforce it.


I think combining the two is the best. I will edit that, thanks for your feedback.


I generally do a TODO with a date written then use a tool to scan for them and rank by date


I don't think anybody's saying not to do it before merging. (How would anyone even tell?)

> A pre commit git hook gets triggered to run the linter[...]

Git hooks actually need to be set up to work, so this incurs overhead for onboarding.


This is one reason why I find GitHub (especially, Enterprise) so frustrating. I want simple server-side githooks to verify that client-side hooks were used (or, at least a good forgery). I don't want to setup an additional CI environment just to run the most basic SED commands. Nor do I want to make my existing CI environment more complicated by merging disparate validations; unit test validation and commit validations.


I built a simple system for some of our repos that fails the build if you don't have the shared team git hooks set up properly, and on failure directs the new engineers on how to fix the situation.


And really, one should just set up the hooks automatically when the build script is run, if you really want to reduce friction.


A great idea, but this also takes time, albeit once rather than N times. Any chance you could share some of the scripts (etc.)?




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