DebtBomb
Make TODOs expire and automatically create Jira tickets
Details
- External ID
- 46603772
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- DebtBomb
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- Jan. 13, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 16
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.6212121212121212
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
Hi HN, In most codebases I’ve worked on, temporary hacks (“TODO: remove later”, “just for this release”) slowly become permanent. Nobody remembers why they exist, but they keep shipping to production. I built a small CLI called DebtBomb to make that explicit. Instead of free-form TODOs, you attach an expiry date to temporary code. When the date passes, CI fails until the code is removed or the expiry is intentionally extended. Recently I added integrations so expired debt bombs don’t just fail CI — they become visible and owned: When a debt bomb expires, DebtBomb can automatically create a Jira ticket with file path, owner, reason, and code snippet. It can also notify Slack, Discord, or Microsoft Teams. You can configure “expiring soon” warnings (e.g., 7 days before) so it’s not just a surprise break. Repo: https://github.com/jobin-404/debtbomb This is still early and I’m mainly trying to validate whether this actually improves how teams handle “temporary” code compared to TODOs, linters, or just creating tickets manually. I’d especially love feedback from people who’ve dealt with tech debt in long-lived codebases or CI-heavy environments. Thanks for reading.
Enrichment
- Theme
- billing, invoicing, and revenue recovery
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Workflow automation
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- auto-expire todos and create jira tickets
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Yes It is a straightforward CLI tool that parses code comments for dates and triggers the Jira REST API upon expiration.
Discussion
15 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: ESLint with todo/fixme bans, Test-based expiration checks, Jira issue tracker, External task management systems
Concerns raised: Build failures frustrate teams, get bypassed with extensions, Technical solution to social/organizational problem won't work, Clogs backlog with low-value items, TODOs serve as inline documentation near code, False positives for intentional permanent decisions
Feature requests: Snooze/break-glass feature for exceptions, Link to tracking tickets in TODO comments, Distinguish temporary vs permanent TODOs
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 34 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #10 of 35 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 61 days after the earliest competitor.
- Enforcing time-bounded technical debt with Git history · hn · 2026-01-11 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.64
- Snowballer · ph · 2026-09-16 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- Viridel · ph · 2026-09-10 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- Snapstack · ph · 2026-09-18 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.36
- ExpireNot · ph · 2026-09-19 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.35
- DueCalm · ph · 2026-09-08 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.35
- Wasteclock for Slack · ph · 2026-09-16 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.34
- Zoffer Bills · ph · 2026-09-29 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.34
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
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