Comment by hansonkd
21 hours ago
got me thinking that it would be interesting to remove all comments that cant be reproduced by llm on code base with comments stripped out.
If the llm can produce similar enough comment from scratch, would it be better to just have an IDE that dynamically injects comments when you need as opposed to them being in version control?
One of the stated goals is to have long-term support and maintainability. Adding in a dependency like an IDE is already a large step away from that goal, and to include a dependency on a LLM's non-auditable output actively steps away from that.
Comments in source code are always going to meet the maintainer's intention and will much more likely cover the use cases that comments are meant to cover - unintuitive cases or decisions, unclear algorithms, general usage to point maintainers in the right direction, and so on. More importantly, comments in the source code require no additional tools or other dependencies and as such are more dependable.
Why would I want comments produced by a roll of the dice rather the human who was in the thick of it?
I would instead be willing to consider some kind of QC assessment. Where does AI think the comment does not match the code because something has fallen out of sync.
I think people are misreading this. I said
> all comments that cant be reproduced by llm
Not remove all comments.
meaning if your comment is so low quality that an LLM will generate it for you by reading the code, then it doesn't belong in VCS