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Comment by epiccoleman | Hacker News Reader

I can't decide if I like this change or not, tbh. I almost always delete the comments Claude adds, to be sure - but at the same time they seem to provide a sort of utility for me as I read through the generated code. They also act, in a funny way, as a kind of checklist as I review changes - I want them all cleaned up (or maybe edited and left in place) before I PR.

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I like to think of models leaving "useless comments" as a way to externalize their reasoning process - maybe they are useless at the end, but leaving them in on a feature branch seems to marginally improve future work (even across conversations). I currently leave them in and either manually clean them up myself before putting up a PR for my team to review or run a final step with some instructions like "review the diff, remove any useless comments". Funnily enough Claude seems pretty competent at identifying and cleaning up useless comments after the fact, which I feel like sort of proves my hypothesis.

I've considered just leaving the comments in, considering maybe they provide some value to future LLMs working in the codebase, but the extra human overhead in dealing with them doesn't seem worth it.

I've been wondering if the "you're absolutely right!" thing is also similar. Like maybe it helps align Claude with the user or something, less likely to stray off or outright refuse a task.

Wouldn't it stand to reason that they would provide a sort of utility for a collegue as they read through the generated code.

comments for me are a code smell:

- like all documentation, they are prone to code rot (going out of date)

- ideally code should be obvious; if you need a comment to explain it, perhaps it's not as simple as it could be, or perhaps we're doing something hacky that we shouldn't

Comments are often the best tool for explaining why a bit of code is formulated how it is, or explaining why a more obvious alternate implementation is a dead end.

An example of this: assume you live in a world where the formula for the circumference of a circle has not been derived. You end up deriving the formula yourself and write a function which returns 2piradius. This is as simple as it gets, not hacky at all, and you would /definitely/ want to include a comment explaining how you arrived at your weird and arbitrary-looking "3.1415" constant.

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