Hacker News Reader

Comment by easton | Hacker News Reader

The reason I barely use copilot is because it tries to write comments for me. I don’t get why they don’t have a button that says “disable autocomplete within comment blocks” (since the IDE knows which things are comments), but it’s so yucky feeling when it tries to write something I wouldn’t say.

View on HN

https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/customizing-copilot/addin...

Not sure that would prevent it offering something as autocomplete in a comment block, but could ask it to write less/no comments generally

I find the comments Copilot proposes is better than average comment quality for the code base I routinely work on: maybe you are so great you don't need any help ever, but that's not true for the average software dev.

> I find the comments Copilot proposes is better than average comment quality for the code base I routinely work on

Maybe the average is just so bad? The completions I get for comments are document what the code is doing, which is not something that I ever put into comments. It's always:

a) A highlevel (prefixed to the function/block/scope definition) list of steps, input expectations and output expectations for the forthcoming function/block/scope

b) A note explaining why the code does what it does.

A comment repeating the code but in English is useless.

The best comments are the type of:

  Whatever bad thing you think of this part is probably true, but I can’t do better.

And

  Beware, weird optimization ahead.

And

  Editing this code requires arcane knowledge.

It's not that my comments are infallible, but if I write something wrong/silly it'll be caught during code review. similarly if there's a comment missing before some arcane nonsense nobody will remember in 3 years, then i'd expect a PR reviewer to tell the dev to add one.

Copilot just likes to puke very useless comments whenever I type "//", especially in autocomplete mode (I don't really use the chat mode).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com