Enforcing time-bounded technical debt with Git history
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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.
HN · launched Jan 11, 2026 · 6 upvotes (top 75%) · 0 views
Niche: git management and workflow tools · 221 launches, 10 in the last 7 days ▼ -23% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Dev tools
- Developer
- Not AI
- Commercial product
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 221 launches in git management and workflow tools →
Could you build this?
Yes This is a CLI tool that parses code comments (like TODOs/FIXMEs) and runs `git blame` or `git log` to calculate their age and fail CI if they exceed a threshold, a classic small utility easily built with AI.
Discussion
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Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 200 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #174 of 201 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 62 days after the earliest competitor.
- DebtBomb · hn · 2026-01-13 · 16 upvotes · similarity 0.65
- Ccgs · hn · 2026-06-06 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.47
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- A context-aware permission guard for Claude Code · hn · 2026-03-11 · 127 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- File Expiry · ph · 2026-10-10 · 4 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- CI/CD in your terminal, zero YAML · hn · 2026-03-25 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- Git-agecrypt · hn · 2026-04-27 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- Claudit · hn · 2026-02-11 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.42
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