[ssanders82]

I use them primarily when developing something large from scratch. All sorts of edge cases / things that can go wrong will pop into my mind when coding a method but I don't want to get out of the flow of whatever I'm doing. In this case a simple "TODO: fix for leap years" or whatever is helpful. When I get closer to completion I will search for these and attend to them.

In a production codebase, you are absolutely correct, you should standardize these items into a ticket manager.

[falcolas]

I do this as well. The codebase becomes my scratchpad, and I leave all kinds of implementation notes throughout as I sketch out what the end product will end up looking like.

Then it's a simple matter of grepping through the codebase for "XXX" and "TODO" and implementing the changes.

Even when starting from scratch, my usual flow is to implement the top level logic using stubs (commented with "XXX"), then go back and fill in the logic from there.