My friend Alex Popoutsis wrote about why he largely stopped using To-Do comments in code, and ask about the preferred way to track the to-do list of others in the codebases.

TL;DR: explicit and tool-aided issue management is healthier.

I also believe it, but I usually don't hold myself from taking // notes, on the heat, side by side with the code. Then unused for months (until I got tools and discipline).

We're not the only ones 😅

The Chromium Project has +30k...:

• HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22339619
• TG: https://www.tickgit.com/browse?repo=github.com/chromium/chromium

The Linux codebase has over 3k TODO comments, many from over a decade ago:

• HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21910391
• TG: https://www.tickgit.com/browse?repo=github.com/torvalds/linux

*TG: Those reports were made with the open-source tool @tickgit_todos to view TO-DO-based pending tasks, progress reports, completion summaries and historical data (using git history). You can use that tool.💡

https://twitter.com/tickgit_todos/status/1367662352842231808

My personal setup is with a to-do's lister extension on the IDE, manually converting every major task to the issue tracker, and treating the rest as part of the technical debt.

Either way, don't use what you won't pay attention to, Alex has some implicit rationale here.

More tools you can use

For teams using Github, you can use a "TODO to Issue" action that will convert newly committed to-do comments to GitHub issues on push and can be config to close the issues if the items are removed in a future commit.

For teams using Jira, the Atlassian's extension for Visual Studio Code can be used to create issues from to-do comments. They may have similar tools for other developer environments (or API).