"By the time the trigger condition occurs no one’s checking that comment that’s buried god knows where. "
You can make the trigger condition actual code and have it send you an email for example, or log to somewhere where you do check (depending on the project).
That’s better, but many trigger conditions are abstract and not implementable as alerts.
Consider for example “this code will only work under the assumption that all of our clients are US companies”.
Detecting in code that the company is aiming at international expansion soon is probably not possible, because if your code was generic enough to account for different countries you wouldn’t have this problem in the first place.
If you can tie these to automated alerts that's great. But there's no need to automate everything, "Do things that don't scale".
I make these comments searchable (they always start with "# TODO: "). And then once a month (or when you're bored) you can go through these and reevaluate them.
Yes, it's a non-scaleable manual process. And I absolutely don't care because it takes less than 30 minutes each month. No amount of effort invested in automation will ever pay off, so I'm pretty happy to do it manually.
I would love these TODO comments to automatically create issues in Github so that we could also discuss these, but unfortunately all of the Github Actions I've tried fail miserably when lines are moved or comments are edited.
"Detecting in code that the company is aiming at international expansion soon is probably not possible"
It is somewhat, if you also keep some general variables for this like "US_Only" that you have to keep track of, but yes, there are of course limitations with that approach. If you do it wrong, it gives just false security that blows up at the wrong time.
That's extra effort too, might as well fix it on the spot.
Also you might not have the data to trigger it in first place. If your todo is "optimize caching of this data" it's hard to see overall system hitratio to know when it might be worth it to start optimizing.
There are also dependency todos, "new version of the thing has that feature and this needs to be changed once we upgrade to it"
"That's extra effort too, might as well fix it on the spot."
It depends on the problem. Some things you do not just "fix on the spot", they take longer and sometimes you do have other, more urgent problems. Those are times, when I do something like this.
You can make the trigger condition actual code and have it send you an email for example, or log to somewhere where you do check (depending on the project).