> The obvious question that comes from this is why not just type TODO, add a few question marks, or highlight the text that needs to be looked at?

Because we know from the software engineering discipline that TODOs never get done, so the safe thing is to avoid that with TK.

I just used to use: ????

It server the same purpose, placeholder for a word I couldn't think of, and wouldn't naturely appear in the text. Plus for me I could hammer out the four characters in frustration too, for not being able to think of the word/term I wanted.

Indeed a great trick. I often double it to TKTK just to make it stand out even more.

Fun fact: the Ghost.org editor looks for TK

https://ghost.org/changelog/tk-reminders/

I've a very dim memory of having heard about it years ago (more than a decades), from an article of Cory Doctorow, and in my mind, he was the one who came up with the idea (and chose the letters TK).

But I can be wrong (maybe it's not from Doctorow, maybe the article did not even claim the paternity of coming up with TK but it was me badly understanding it, ...)

I do this a lot but I use “TK:” with the colon to make it unambiguously grep-able (stands out better visually too)

If you use Brashtag notation you could insert #tk{} bag.

https://github.com/pratikdeoghare/brashtag

LLMs should use "TK" or stable diffusion (and the like) so as not to get hung up on sequential words/thoughts and fill them in later instead of hallucinating filler.

Tk without Tcl?

Shout out to Title TK by the Breeders.

GCP employees heart rate spiking at the title.

Could you instead use any two numerical digits? Then you've got a tagging system with up to 100 tags.

This assumes you're writing according to guidelines that insist you spell out all numbers. i.e. 58 is always intentionally "fifty-eight", so "58" must be your own meta text.

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tl;dr

add tk when you hit a wall (abbreviated from 'to come', yet spelled with k as tc appears in many words)