> Typically keep comments on a single line without line breaks — if a comment is useful, developers will scroll to read them, if it’s not they can easily scroll past it.
Disagree. Personally that sounds like a massive barrier to reading the comment to me. Limited width column text is generally regarded as easier to read, make your comments easier to read. Especially as I probably have the code open in a limited width window, as that's what I expect from code.
Yeah, if IDE's allowed code folding of comments then the authors original problem (having to scroll past comments they thought weren't useful) wouldn't be that big a deal.
Yeah, this particular bullet point almost made me stop reading the rest of the article thinking that the author has zero idea what the hell they're on about...
I agree with that. I'm just not sure all of us have the same leeway to improve the codebase, and the cost isn't the same either. When you have less means, you spend them more sparingly.
I'm afraid this all gets thrown out the window nowadays.
Unless I tell them not to, LLMs lean on slapping verbose comments of the worst kind - describing the code instead of the reasons for putting it there.
I ask them to write comments in ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English, but all I really get from that is tersness.
Also the other day I stumbled upon a huge pile of documentation and I'm still trying to figure out if it's human or machine written. I stopped reading it half way through as I figured that perhaps it wasn't written for humans to read.
The most WTF comments are the ones that describe how the code looked during a rewrite session with no commits. He writes bad code, I ask him to rewrite it, and he leaves a comment saying why the previous implementation was bad, with no history in git of the previous implementation.
LLMs do this to communicate with their future selves to keep them from retracing what turned out to be the garden path.
Another pattern is where they put comments in multiple places in the code to say that those need to be kept in sync in a very particular way ...that sort of thing has always been considered a code smell, but seems to be the post-AI "new normal": it's cheaper for the AI to leave it to its future self to have to make every change in multiple places than it is for its present-day self to do the refactor.
Before AI, writing code that worked was costly and structuring it well, while you were at it, didn't increase your cost all that much. Now, AI has reduced the cost of writing badly-structured but working code, while it hasn't reduced the cost of writing well-structured code all that much. Since no one who decides about this sort of thing has given two craps about structure, ever, bad structure is just what we're left with now.
The day will come when codebases will be completely unintelligible to humans. The best example is when AI actually refers to code in comments with actual line numbers. No human would ever do that or find that useful if another human did it, because it would be next to impossible for a human to keep the line numbers properly updated after edits and they would soon all be wrong and meaningless.
You'd have to go very far back in computing history to get to where we learned not to do that. Was there ever programming with goto's referencing line numbers instead of named labels? If so, this would be that.
Opus 5 has this habit and it makes any kinds of revisions of plain text almost useless. I can restrain it a little by adding instructions to just describe the current state, but we all know how dumb LLMs are at following these kinds of instruction.
> Unless I tell them not to, LLMs lean on slapping verbose comments of the worst kind - describing the code instead of the reasons for putting it there.
Well, my LLMs are "smarter" than yours. They'll describe why the code is there. They'll even try to keep these comments in sync with code as it makes changes.
This includes describing the "why" behind the change even on code affected only accidentally, e.g. by reformat or reindent. And, if it wrote some code and then later learned half of it is wrong, it'll remove the offending parts and leave comments telling what used to be there, and why it isn't anymore.
Same for commit/PR messages.
May or may not be related to a recent tendency in Opus/Fable models I noticed, to eagerly turn user feedback into rules, self-correct by adding more rules, and then when some rule fails, correct it by adding a counter-steering rule - accumulating rules until eventually getting lost in them.
I absolutely agree that those things should take priority, but I think those things can only go so far and there's a threshold of complexity beyond which there will always be some benefit to comments. You can absolutely reduce the need for 'signposts' if you avoid creating a maze.
As others have said, you didn't always build the maze. Or you built a lovely intuitive path and then were hit with an unexpected new requirement that forced you to add twisty little passages. Or, like me, you're not a perfect being and had to compromise based on some complication you didn't expect.
Hello, I am that person. I have been programming for a long time, but I'm not trying to make any claims that my experience means I know any better. The claim is simply that modern coding practices often produce code that is difficult to navigate and that useful comments and documentation can deliver great benefits.
I do make some suggestions on how to approach those things, but they're simply suggestions based on my own experience, I'm not trying to assert any kind of absolute correct approach.
I disagree with the overall sentiment of this article. I wouldn't say comments are never useful, because they certainly can be. But once verbose commenting becomes the norm, people (and now especially LLMs) will overuse them, making the code unnecessarily obtuse and difficult to read. And the point about maintenance is real.
There are also a couple of 'pointless' statements in the article itself:
> "Use a combination of in-line and standalone comments, depending on the situation"
The point of that statement was to run counter to the standards of "always us X type of comments" that some teams adopt. My suggestion is that there isn't a "correct" type of comment that you should always use, but rather that it's highly situational.
It's really a parallel to grammar in any other kind of language - there isn't a singular 'correct' way to structure a piece of writing into paragraphs, but it's also typically incorrect to treat each sentence as a paragraph or to avoid paragraphs entirely and write everything as a single block of text.
It's unthinkable that a team of writers would ever try to standardise on "never use paragraphs" or "every line is a paragraph", but some programming teams do exactly the equivalent of that!
Thanks for the reply. I didn't mean to be dismissive or discredit the article.
The problem you described is real, and one I face daily at work. Anecdotally, every time we've tried to curate the comments and organize them (especially when referencing external documentation, as you also mentioned), it invariably ends up becoming stale and just another point of contention down the road.
I'm now more of a proponent of either not commenting, or putting the context and rationale in the commit message instead.
I use Ag integrated in the editor all the time. But while it is indispensable for me, I wouldn't say that this helps in all situations, nor is it the best tool to find connections in many situations.
31 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 44.2 ms ] threadDisagree. Personally that sounds like a massive barrier to reading the comment to me. Limited width column text is generally regarded as easier to read, make your comments easier to read. Especially as I probably have the code open in a limited width window, as that's what I expect from code.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_folding
> In code, comments are our signposts
No. Naming and good architecture are. Intuitive folder trees. Concise docs. Clear separation of concerns such that naming can suffice.
The more comments you need to ‘map’ your code, the worse of a job you’ve done.
You don’t choose what your forebears have written, though.
Unless I tell them not to, LLMs lean on slapping verbose comments of the worst kind - describing the code instead of the reasons for putting it there.
I ask them to write comments in ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English, but all I really get from that is tersness.
Also the other day I stumbled upon a huge pile of documentation and I'm still trying to figure out if it's human or machine written. I stopped reading it half way through as I figured that perhaps it wasn't written for humans to read.
Your english is really good, except for that little mistake.
Another pattern is where they put comments in multiple places in the code to say that those need to be kept in sync in a very particular way ...that sort of thing has always been considered a code smell, but seems to be the post-AI "new normal": it's cheaper for the AI to leave it to its future self to have to make every change in multiple places than it is for its present-day self to do the refactor.
Before AI, writing code that worked was costly and structuring it well, while you were at it, didn't increase your cost all that much. Now, AI has reduced the cost of writing badly-structured but working code, while it hasn't reduced the cost of writing well-structured code all that much. Since no one who decides about this sort of thing has given two craps about structure, ever, bad structure is just what we're left with now.
The day will come when codebases will be completely unintelligible to humans. The best example is when AI actually refers to code in comments with actual line numbers. No human would ever do that or find that useful if another human did it, because it would be next to impossible for a human to keep the line numbers properly updated after edits and they would soon all be wrong and meaningless.
You'd have to go very far back in computing history to get to where we learned not to do that. Was there ever programming with goto's referencing line numbers instead of named labels? If so, this would be that.
Well, my LLMs are "smarter" than yours. They'll describe why the code is there. They'll even try to keep these comments in sync with code as it makes changes.
This includes describing the "why" behind the change even on code affected only accidentally, e.g. by reformat or reindent. And, if it wrote some code and then later learned half of it is wrong, it'll remove the offending parts and leave comments telling what used to be there, and why it isn't anymore.
Same for commit/PR messages.
May or may not be related to a recent tendency in Opus/Fable models I noticed, to eagerly turn user feedback into rules, self-correct by adding more rules, and then when some rule fails, correct it by adding a counter-steering rule - accumulating rules until eventually getting lost in them.
I wonder if that's actually useful for an LLM though. It's additional context that should steer the LLM not to change the code to do something else.
As others have said, you didn't always build the maze. Or you built a lovely intuitive path and then were hit with an unexpected new requirement that forced you to add twisty little passages. Or, like me, you're not a perfect being and had to compromise based on some complication you didn't expect.
Years ago I worked on a project that had a n tier architecture and facade pattern for the frontend
It was good architecture for the lead developer who set it up but bad for the new team who need to update the tech
So comments and docs are both valuable
Nowadays with AI the calculus has changed once more
If, like me, you're trying to compile it, don't forget to set the
flag in gcc, so: Then run it as:I do make some suggestions on how to approach those things, but they're simply suggestions based on my own experience, I'm not trying to assert any kind of absolute correct approach.
There are also a couple of 'pointless' statements in the article itself:
> "Use a combination of in-line and standalone comments, depending on the situation"
isn't that just every kind of comment?
The point of that statement was to run counter to the standards of "always us X type of comments" that some teams adopt. My suggestion is that there isn't a "correct" type of comment that you should always use, but rather that it's highly situational.
It's really a parallel to grammar in any other kind of language - there isn't a singular 'correct' way to structure a piece of writing into paragraphs, but it's also typically incorrect to treat each sentence as a paragraph or to avoid paragraphs entirely and write everything as a single block of text.
It's unthinkable that a team of writers would ever try to standardise on "never use paragraphs" or "every line is a paragraph", but some programming teams do exactly the equivalent of that!
The problem you described is real, and one I face daily at work. Anecdotally, every time we've tried to curate the comments and organize them (especially when referencing external documentation, as you also mentioned), it invariably ends up becoming stale and just another point of contention down the road.
I'm now more of a proponent of either not commenting, or putting the context and rationale in the commit message instead.