Comment by robertwer

There seems to be some evidence that literate programming style comments help humans to comprehend code they don't know. I found a paper investigating this.

Some folks from Google tested 1) how good LLMs can update existing code with LP style comments and 2) if that helps humans to better understand that enhanced code. (see the 2024 arXiv paper "Natural Language Outlines for Code").

If I remember correctly they had systematically tested how good humans could understand the enhanced code compared to no comments at all and they also tested different flavours of comments (line level, block level etc.).

The conclusion was: if you use the right amount of comments in the right style (intent explaining the purpose of the code on block level, not every line), it's very beneficial.