Hacker News Reader

I have to ask Claude to compact the comments every time, and I give specific criteria for it. Never ever reiterate what’s in the code, never mention decisions not made, never mention the conversation, etc etc.

Even then it is conservative. For the love of God, compact the comments.

Comments become a huge maintenance burden, especially in the age of AI. They just grow and grow, and then mislead the AI later on.

View on HN

I just wrote a utility to rip all comments out of the code. Now the code is fully uncommented and it has saved lots of input tokens and also lots of meandering because the model is no longer getting stuck on bad ideas it told itself about.

That's is something I did not consider, the model using the existing comments as input. Comments that it may itself have written.

I set a line budget for comments (also wiki page parts, chat responses, etc). That only helps when I ask it to do a second pass to reword everything to the budget and add links. I think they tuned it this way to stash reasoning dumps in the code. Unlike human developers, it has no context in its head, other than general GitHub knowledge.

That is a dramatic shortcoming, but I fix it with permalinks to other files. https://replicated.live/blog/link

Reply on news.ycombinator.com