The problem with TODO comments is that nothing actually forces you to resolve them. Developers agree to take shortcuts they will revisit, but never actually get around to it.

A good example is feature flags... how often do you go back and actually clean up old flag code?

The tool:

Todo or Else is a small CLI written in Go but supporting multiple languages. Add it to your project and then annotate your TODOs with "tags" like so:

    TODO (by:2027-03, owner:Fran) do something

You can specify a date by either

- using `by:YYYY-MM` or `by:YYYY-MM-DD` to set a deadline

- using `from:YYYY-MM-DD` to set a created date (default staleness threshold is 90 days, configurable)

(I used Go for a few reasons. Firstly: the performance is really solid, on my newish MBP the scanner can process a few thousand source files in just under two seconds. Secondly: the cross compilation story is still really good, even with CGO. Zig handles the tree sitter compilation for MacOS and Linux.)