Hi HN,
In most codebases I’ve worked on, temporary hacks (“TODO: remove later”, “just for this release”) slowly become permanent. Nobody remembers why they exist, but they keep shipping to production.
I built a small CLI called DebtBomb to make that explicit.
Instead of free-form TODOs, you attach an expiry date to temporary code. When the date passes, CI fails until the code is removed or the expiry is intentionally extended.
Recently I added integrations so expired debt bombs don’t just fail CI — they become visible and owned:
When a debt bomb expires, DebtBomb can automatically create a Jira ticket with file path, owner, reason, and code snippet.
It can also notify Slack, Discord, or Microsoft Teams.
You can configure “expiring soon” warnings (e.g., 7 days before) so it’s not just a surprise break.
Repo: https://github.com/jobin-404/debtbomb
This is still early and I’m mainly trying to validate whether this actually improves how teams handle “temporary” code compared to TODOs, linters, or just creating tickets manually.
I’d especially love feedback from people who’ve dealt with tech debt in long-lived codebases or CI-heavy environments.
Thanks for reading.
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