Comment by sebastiennight
15 hours ago
Am I the only one who's had Claude almost systematically remove human-written comments?
It might be touching one line of actual code in a file, and take advantage of it to remove 20+ lines of actual useful comments.
Everybody is talking about the opposite, so I'm wondering if this is rare.
Is this in one of the skills or CLAUDE.md? This was happening in our codebase, but turned out it was interpreting an instruction to not add "what" comments as license to strip out comments.
Sometimes I have luck interrogating Claude on why it did something. It'll either point to a skill or agent file with the culprit, or it'll respond with some vapid nonsense and apologize.
I've definitely seen this. One of my least favorite parts of developing with AI is when I add print statements or small changes and the LLM removes them in the process of doing the next thing. I want to work _with_ the AI, not have it stomp all over my code.
Do you think it's actively deciding to remove them or just not noticing you added them and then overwriting?
I ask because when I started informing it I made personal edits, it stopped doing this kind of thing so often and let me work _with_ it more.
My saved prompt now says never to assume a file has not been edited since the last time it was read between prompts.