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The original was posted on /r/opensource by /u/Star-Shadow-007 on 2026-01-10 22:27:51+00:00.
In most codebases I’ve worked on, the same pattern keeps repeating: someone adds a temporary workaround to ship something (“just for this release”, “we’ll clean it up later”), and then it quietly becomes permanent. After a few months, nobody remembers why it exists, but it’s now part of production.
I built a small CLI called DebtBomb to experiment with a different approach: instead of vague TODOs, temporary code gets an explicit expiry date in a comment. When that date passes, the tool reports it — and optionally fails CI — until the code is either removed or the expiry is updated.
Example:
// debtbomb: expires 2026-02-10 — remove after experiment A
The tool just scans comments, so it’s language-agnostic. It runs as a single binary and can be dropped into any CI. There’s also an npm wrapper so it’s easy to try in JavaScript projects.
It’s something I built because I kept seeing “temporary” code live forever, and I wanted a lightweight way to make that visible and intentional.
If this sounds useful or if you have thoughts on how this could work better, the repo is here:
Happy to hear ideas, criticism, or alternative approaches.