I don't even use todos. I just try to remember and if I forget it must not have been important anyways
How can you tell?
There are hundreds of CVE-worthy bug reports open.
TODO comments ARE documentation
README's are documentation.
I had a vibe coding coworker take over a project. Added 8,000 lines of documentation all dated 6 months in the future.
dated 6 months in the future.
That's forward thinking! (and illegal in my industry.)
You have laws about your code comments?
General practice for all quality records, and code can be considered a quality record, never post-date anything. Especially code because it's so discoverable by cross-checkable references.
Has anybody been prosecuted for this? Probably not, but if an investigation finds that records were intentionally falsified with intent to deceive / cover up problems, that can lead to very costly regulatory responses. Even a minor regulatory response noting practices of inaccurate dates on records is still costly to the business that note is made on.
Also doesn't have those damn emojis 🎯️ ✅️
Here in jaoan, the land of emoji, young people are using less emoji not because they don't like AI, but because anyone older than 40 use it waaay too much and they think it makes their text look like an old person wrote it.
Yup I also associate excessive emoji use with boomers (though some millenials are also over 40)
But only those marketing adjacent in my experience.
Always gives of a "hello fellow kids, buy my companies product" vibe.
In my project so many TODOs accumulated I had to start tagging them
TODO: write TODO comments
Hey, where did you find my code?!
As a corollary, AI takes those out of date TODOs and READMEs as gospel truth and doesn't look any further. I kept a "janitor list" in main() but maybe wasn't too great at scrubbing it on the regular. AI took a long detour to work around problems that didn't exist anymore.
I do use it and find it useful but it's like your kids helping you cook dinner. You can not take your eyes off it. Otherwise you get to flip a coin between firetrucks or emergency room.
As an open source project maintainer I can always tell whenever a pull request is AI assisted because no human would ever write full tests for all their pull requests.
Who needs TODOs when you can just forget about the things and have less to do?
You laugh, but in 5 years, a metric butt ton of vibe coded projects will look exactly like this.
The README can only be out of date if the project is maintained without too much AI.
Because AI could fix a typo and then waste your tokens regenerating the entire README to tell new users that there was a typo that was removed.
# [project name]
TODO: write readmeWelcome to Programmer Humor!
This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!
For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.