Perhaps an abbreviation would be the best of both worlds, and debug strings should be prefixed with "DNS"

You won't need to submit that particular string working at Google, right?

We could also have an acronym for the more severe "DO NOT SUBMIT - SECURITY EXPECTATIONS COMPROMISE".

DNS-SEC...

Confused sysadmins wondering if this is SOX code...

The automation which can check for do not submit itself is hard to submit. Or at least updates to it are hard to submit.

forbidden_string = "DO NOT " + "SUBMIT"

Seems easy enough?

Just disable that particular linting rule (or however it's implemented) in that repo.

Well in the LLM era, you could. I’m not sure you should :)

> You can't automate checking for random strings, right?

No, but you can make the string configurable.

Related in terms of being easy to search for, I use the abbreviation "TK" as a placeholder for text or incomplete code. Took this from the publishing industry (my partner worked in magazines) -- it's a combination that does not appear in regular English and so is easy to both see and to use search tools for.

I hope you never built a rooTKit.

TK is a semi-well known widget toolkit/GUI toolkit which came from TCL and today it's the default toolkit for Python. Nothing fancy, just basic menues/buttons and widgets, but they get the job done in a hurry.