Every once in awhile we grep through the TODOs and see if we should write some tickets from them. Works fine.
That's the universe telling you the TODO is useless noise that points to a workitem that no one, not even you, find it relevant enough to track or work on.
When that happens, do everyone around you a favour and leave out the TODO comment.
// TODO: This is fine for now, but if we start handling `bar`s, we’ll need an extra field for `quxx`.One more reason to not have a TODO item and instead track work on a ticket. Sneaking fixes/changes as part of other tickets mixes up the rationale for tickets and makes changes harder to track. If all you're doing is a cleanup then all the more reason why it should be in an independent PR tracked accordingly.
Where it will never be picked up, because rework tickets never get prioritized over feature work until something breaks.
And when some future engineer comes along and asks themselves why the hell this code is the way it is, they'll have to git-blame, dig through commits, find PRs for commits, hopefully find referenced ticket numbers, read those, and play archeologist to try to reconstruct whether there's good reason for the existing code's being from those indirect signals. Whereas a simple "TODO" could just tell said future engineer what they ought to know.
I sincerely appreciate a well-written TODO, and I make every effort to write good TODOs for others.