I would do the same if I weren't afraid of coming off as passive-aggressive given that I voiced my opinions in the past but received a reply in the vein of: "We're aware that this old code is really bad, but with our constrained resources we need to prioritize keeping this boat afloat.".

I keep mine locally. I have the PlainTasks[0] package installed for Sublime Text. It's a plaintext file with a bit of TODO functionality baked in. When I find something, I note the commit, the line (or block), and why I want to fix it. I try to slightly estimate high enough that I could throw some fixes in for the sprint.

[0]: https://github.com/aziz/PlainTasks

At some point you do need to stop baling water and actually plug the hole though.

Nah. The bridge crew all have executive lifeboats. No biggie if the ship goes down.

To completely and hyperbolically torture this metaphor, as long as you whip the galley slaves to row fast enough so that you can jump to safety on "Short Term Stock Gain" Island, you'll be fine.

They should teach this at MBA school. But they don't.

As well as the many IDEs and editors that support these comment tags, Ruby on Rails (and I'm sure other frameworks also) provides direct support for these.

  rails notes

Will return you a little text report that you can use in your CI or anywhere else that groks text.

I used to do this in visual studio, it had a task list view that would aggregate all the comments that start with 'TODO'. Since I made the move to VSCode I haven't found anything similar.

I think https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Gruntfug... is what you're looking for.

Thank you!