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Then tell it to write better comments...

Ah, so it's good enough to write code on its own without time-consuming, excessive hand-holding. But it's not good enough to write comments on its own.

If you put in the work to write rules and give good prompts you get good results just like every other tool created by mankind.

How often do you use coding LLMs?

I can't speak to comments rules specifically but I am a heavy user of "agentic" coding and use rules files and while they help they are simply not that reliable. For something like comments that's probably not that big of a deal because some extra bad comments isn't the end of the world.

But I have rules that are quite important for successfully completing a task by my standards and it's very frustrating when the LLM randomly ignores them. In a previous comment I explained my experiences in more detail but depending on the circumstances instruction compliance is 9/10 times at best, with some instructions/tasks as poor as 6/10 in the most "demanding" scenarios particularly as the context window fills up during a longer agentic run.

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