Im sorry but that’s exactly the kind of automation that sounds helpful in theory but ends up creating bloat and inefficiency in practice. Like the article says, the second a TODO gets a timer/deadline attached, it stops being a quick, lightweight note and turns into process overhead (note the distinction between something that is urgent and needs fixing now, and something that really is just a TODO).
Maybe a weird way to put it, but it’s like a TODO that used to be lean and trail-ready - able to carry itself for miles over tough terrain with just some snacks and water - suddenly steps on a scale and gets labeled “overweight" and "bloated" and flagged as a problem, and sent into the healthcare system. It loses its agility and becomes a burden.
"But the TODO is a serious problem that does need to get addressed now" Ok then it was never actually a TODO, and thats something to take up with the dev who wrote it. But most TODOs are actually just TODOs - not broken code, but helpful crumbs left by diligent, benevolent devs. And if you start to attack/accuse every TODO as "undone work that needed to be done yesterday" then youll just create a culture where devs are afraid to write them, which is really stupid and will just create even more inefficiency/pitfalls down the road - way more than if you had just accepted TODOs as natural occurrences in codebases