"It's surprising how much objectionable you find in..."
It isn't much, it is just the one word that I find wrong. The comment you are responding to is an analysis of the effect of the chosen wording as demonstrated by @thachmai.
The semantics of the word 'driven' here ARE turning the given workflow into something that should be adhered to. If this weren't the case the word 'driven' would have no meaning and could thus be left out. Which would have been the better choice.
Furthermore, if you look at the article itself you can see that the whole tone is in line with my feeling about the title:
"The worst thing you can do is to interrupt what you are currently doing in order to fix the new problem. Instead just write freeMyObject() and don't care, but at the same time, open a different editor, and write:"
This doesn't come across as "Do you ever get distracted while programming by small pieces of irrelevant code? Try keeping a todo list to keep track of little cleanup so that you can come back to them later."
The author seems to think that you are a bad programmer if you don't take notes while programming and cleanup things you find along the way. @thachmai picked up on this and repeated this frame in his reply to my first comment. I got excited by this as it is exactly what I meant.
Words matter.
“-driven” doesn't imply demand, it implies the center of a given workflow. antirez is stating that this approach (which is more than just taking notes, since taking notes just means “writing stuff down” and says nothing about interruption) boosts productivity, and that it is centered around the process of stashing thoughts and observations without interrupting the present task. He also outlines why he thinks this is the case.
You are mischaracterizing the blog post by underspecifying what it says, then attacking the mischaracterization… I'm not sure that approach tracks with your claim to care about semantics. It's not just words that matter, it's also how they're collected into titles, sentences, paragraphs, documents, and how they exist in their broader context (software industry parlance, in this case).
This 'article' explains the trivial task of keeping track of todos and separating main and sub tasks. Something that I most people know how to do. 'Centralising' what we do around the written word is what separates us from animals and you find it everywhere.
I find coming up with a name with the word 'driven' in it for such a common thing somewhat grandiose. That is my critique.
