Enforcing time-bounded technical debt with Git history

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External ID

46575321

Source

HN

Company

—

Product

Enforcing time-bounded technical debt with Git history

Website domain

github.com

Launched

Jan. 11, 2026

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Upvotes

6

Upvotes percentile

0.2549407114624506

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Fetched at

Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.

Updated at

Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.

Description

I kept running into the same problem in large codebases: “temporary” code almost never gets removed. People add TODOs, FIXMEs, or quick hacks to hit a deadline, and six months later nobody remembers why they’re there or who owns them. They quietly turn into production bugs. I built a small CLI that treats those comments as time-bounded instead of permanent. You can attach an expiry date to a TODO in the code, and when the date passes, CI fails and points to exactly where the expired code lives. It works by: scanning comments across any language parsing structured annotations and optionally using git blame to infer who added them and when I tried to keep it simple and CI-friendly rather than tied to any particular language or linter. Here’s the repo if anyone wants to look at the implementation: https://github.com/jobin-404/debtbomb I’d love feedback from people who’ve dealt with long-lived “temporary” code in production.

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