Close the exemptions a review can invent to approve a TODO - #46
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The completeness rules already blocked deferred work unless the ticket or PR discussion accepted the scope-down, but nothing said who may supply that acceptance or what evidence counts. A review pass could therefore assert one on its own -- calling a TODO "a deliberate design choice" or "a documented out-of-scope backlog item" with no ticket and no author statement behind either phrase -- and approve. Make the exemption evidentiary: quote the granting sentence from the ticket or from the author, or request changes. Name the rationalizations that have been used to wave a TODO through so they cannot be reached for again, and say plainly that a well-written TODO is a worse finding rather than a lesser one, since a comment that explains the consequence proves the author knew.
Same constraints, imperative and roughly half the lines.
bockets
marked this pull request as ready for review
September 1, 2026 21:03
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no-ticket
Completeness checks already block TODOs that defer required work unless the ticket or PR discussion explicitly accepts the reduced scope. However, the rule did not specify who could grant that exception or what evidence was required, allowing a reviewer to invent an exemption.
This happened in BiggerPockets/biggerpockets#30718: two deferred requirements were approved as intentional backlog items despite no supporting statement in the ticket, PR body, or author comments.
This change requires reviewers to quote the acceptance from the ticket, PR body, or an author comment. Reviewer speculation and silence do not count as acceptance. Reviewers may still dismiss an invalid completeness finding after checking the diff and citing the relevant file and line.
The shared rule applies to the Codex pass and both synthesis arms across consuming repositories.