Here Be Dragons
Idiom · Hacker Culture
Definitions
A code comment warning that the following section is dangerous, poorly understood, or likely to break if modified. Borrowed from the medieval cartographic tradition of marking unknown territories with dragons.
In plain English: A warning comment in code meaning 'this section is dangerous and poorly understood — change it at your own risk.' Borrowed from old maps that marked unexplored territories.
In code review, 'here be dragons' comments are a red flag — they indicate technical debt that everyone knows about but nobody fixes. The longer a dragon comment exists, the more likely that section becomes the source of a production incident that nobody can debug.
Example: '// HERE BE DRAGONS: This regex handles all date parsing. Do not modify unless you understand ISO 8601, RFC 2822, and human despair.' — actual code comment
Source: tech debt indicator