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Comment by Aachen | Hacker News Reader

Why remove the comment that summarises the intent for humans? The compiler will ignore your comment anyway, so it's only there for the next human who comes along and will help them understand the code

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Because the code, when written, is usually obvious enough.

Something like:

  query = query.orderBy(field: "username", Ordering.DESC)

Doesn't need an explanation, but when working in a language I don't know well, I might not remember whether I'm supposed to call orderBy on the query or on the ORM module and pass query as the argument, whether the kwarg is called "field" or "column", whether it wants a string or something like `User.name` as the column expression, how to specify the ordering and so on.

Like he says, the "comment" describes what he wants to do. That's not what humans are interested in. The human already knows "what he wants to do" when they read the code. It's the things like "why did he want to do this in the first place?" that is lacking in the code, and what information is available to add in a comment for the sake of humans.

Remember, LLMs are just compilers for programming languages that just so happen to have a lot of similarities with natural language. The code is not the comment. You still need to comment your code for humans.

> Like he says, the "comment" describes what he wants to do. That's not what humans are interested in.

When I'm maintaining other people's code, or my own after enough time has gone by, I'm very interested in that sort of comment. It gives me a chance to see if the code as written does what the comment says it was intended to do. It's not valuable for most of the code in a project, but is incredibly valuable for certain key parts.

You're right that comments about why things were done the way they were are the most valuable ones, but this kind of comment is in second place in my book.

Or for something that needs like a quick mathematical lemma or a worked example. A comment on what is fantastic.

It's often unnecessarily verbose. If you read a comment and glance at the code that follows, you'll understand what it is supposed to do. But the comment you're giving as an instruction to an LLM usually contains information which will then be duplicated in the generated code.

I see. Might still be good to have a verbose comment than no comment at all, as well as a marker of "this was generated" so (by the age of the code) you have some idea of what quality the LLM was in that year and whether to proofread it once more or not

External comments are API usage comments. LLM prompts are also implementation proposal.

Implementation comments belong inside the implementation, so they should be over if not deleted.

Next human will put the code in a prompt and ask what it does. Chinese Whispers.

I tried making a meme some months ago with exactly this idea, but for emails. One person would tell an LLM "answer that I'm fine with either option" and sends a 5 KB email, in response to which the recipient receives it and gets the automatic summary function to tell them (in a good case) "they're happy either way" or (in a bad case) "they don't give a damn". It didn't really work, too complex for meme format as far as my abilities went, but yeah the bad translator effect is something I'm very much expecting from people who use an LLM without disclosing it

If someone is going to use an LLM to send me an email, I'd much rather them just send me the prompt directly. For the LLM message to be useful the prompt would have included all the context and details anyway, I don't need an LLM to make it longer and sound more "professional" or polite.

That is actually exactly my unstated point / the awareness I was hoping to achieve by trying to make that meme :D

Not necessarily. Your prompt could include instructions to gather information from your emails and address book to tell your friend about all the relevant contacts you know in the shoe industry.

Well that sounds reasonable enough. My only request is that you send me the prompt and let me decide if I want to comply...informed consent!

This meme already exists ;) https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/128nwi2/bullet_poi...

Wow, I love good, original programming jokes like these, even the ideas of the jokes. I used to browse r/ProgrammerHumor frequently, but it is too repetitive -- mostly recycled memes and there is anything new.

This is one that I really liked: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/l5gg3t/thi...

(No need to Orientalize to defamiarize, especially when a huge fraction of the audience is Chinese, so Orientalizing doesn't defamiliarize. Game of Whispers or Telephone works fine.)

Do the Chinese call it English Whispers?

Chinese-Americans, at least, call it a game of Telephone, like everyone else in the English-speaking world except for the actual English.

We call it “Telephone” because “Chinese Whispers” not only sounds racist, it is also super confusing. You need a lot of cultural context to understand the particular way in which Chinese whispers would be different from any other set of whispers.

I happened to re-read this, and to be clear, I'm not Chinese-American. the "we" there means "everyone else in the English-speaking world except for the actual English."

It’s all Greek to them.

Pardon my French.

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