Honey Debt

Honey Debt

Lever 1 trades code for a known ceiling. That trade is only honest if someone can see it later. Every deliberate simplification carries a honey: comment naming its ceiling and the trigger to revisit; this collects them into one ledger.

Scan

grep -rnE '(#|//|--|/\*) ?honey:' . --exclude-dir={node_modules,.git,dist,build,vendor}

Each hit is one row. The comment prefix is what keeps prose that merely mentions the convention out of the ledger.

Output

One row per marker, grouped by file:

<file>:<line> — <what was simplified>. ceiling: <the limit>. trigger: <when to revisit>.

The convention is honey: <ceiling>, <trigger>, so both fields come straight from the comment. Add git blame -L<line>,<line> -- <file> per row only if the user asks who owns it.

Tag any marker with no trigger no-trigger — a ceiling without a revisit condition is the shape that rots. End with:

<N> markers, <M> with no trigger.

Nothing found: No honey: debt. Clean ledger.

Boundaries

• Report only. Don't fix, refactor, or remove markers — the user decides what to pay down. Offer, don't act.
• Don't invent debt. A TODO/FIXME is not a honey: marker; mention the count separately at most once if it's large, don't fold it into the ledger.
• Don't editorialise per row. The ledger is data. Save any judgement for one closing line, and only if something is genuinely alarming.