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Comment by yosito | Hacker News Reader

I pretty strongly disagree with this. The advantage of using TODO for everything, is that it's easily searchable, and you don't have to try to guess/remember, which labels are used for your comments. If your task is more nuanced than a simple TODO, you can explain in the description after the keyword. The purpose of the keyword is to make it easy to find and take action on in the future, and moving away from using a single keyword makes it easier to miss a comment and harder to take action.

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Full agree. They also write

> the value of using a broader selection of terms is that you (and therefore all the other programmers you’re collaborating with), are able to be more descriptive about what it is precisely that you need “to do.”

But that's what the space after `TODO:` is for. To say what it is you need to do later.

The less complexity you add, the less you have to maintain. This mainly applies to things of a certain smaller scale, but I find I encounter `TODO` in my code when I am in a certain scope or just have some free time to refactor, fix things, etc., neither of which require anything beyond a searchable string, as you mentioned.

This reminds me of any note taking app that uses #tags. You start in earnest and tag things; you end up with twelve different tags for #cooking, #baking, #food, #recipes, etc. because you forgot which one was which when organizing; it falls into disarray; you are left with unusable cruft, so you end up just searching for "bread" in the search bar, anyway.

That exact problem you mention about tag saturation is why I switched entirely to a zettel method where notes are only organized by what they link to or from. Tag structures also just aren’t that great for later recall.

That's kinda what made google win when it stomped alta vista into dust, right?

No, it was infinite free money that made Google the winner.

And what about notes that doesn't have/need any link?

They go into the slip box to be searched by raw text when needed.

Edit: Really, in a zettel flow, you’re supposed to capture notes as fleeting thoughts that are processed and synthesized later into long form writing.

Each note should initially have few links (if any) until you’ve ruminated and expanded on that note in your own words. These are usually called literature notes in zettel workflows.

That's a totally fair assessment - I can certainly relate with tags in note-taking apps

I utilize a mixed methodology: TODO-X, where X is a subcategory describing what kind of TODO it is. For example:

TODO-BUG TODO-OPTIMIZE TODO-FEATURE

I just do something like:

// TODO: Optimize this function

// TODO: Finish implementing this feature

I also label comments with BUG, NOTE and HACK, but not for unfinished items on a todo list.

I as going to say the same (except more "TODO FIXME"; either works). It's trivial to just do both, making it generically and specifically findable.

This is great.

Which other subcategories do you use?

Todo-incomplete Todo-refactor

Some others I imagine?

At least in Visual Studio and I assume other ides you can get nice solutionwide lists of other tags, and even add your own. But I’d agree, easiest thing that works in most cases is just TODO: I’ll sometimes add !!! To really important todos.

They say there are two hard things in computer science and 'naming things' is one of them.

Every benefit you listed is legit, yet not even the sum of them can compensate for the loss of fidelity and lack of human scalability which results from using 'TODO' for everything. Anyone competent enough to edit code can handle holding 'seven plus or minus two' types of comment tags in their head. Those who can't (or, more often, who can't be bothered to) aren't suffering from impostor syndrome. They might actually simply be impostors.

grep TODO * -r is my issue tracker

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