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Comment by sevenseacat

1 day ago

I've seen people report cleaner code by forbidding agents from writing comments. Anecdotal, but interesting.

5 comments

sevenseacat

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cpeterso  20 hours ago

Mozilla's Firefox AGENTS.md begins with:

  Limit the amount of comments you put in the code to a strict minimum. You should almost never add comments, except sometimes on non-trivial code, function definitions if the arguments aren't self-explanatory, and class definitions and their members.

  Do not remove existing comments unless they are directly related to what you are changing.

https://searchfox.org/firefox-main/source/AGENTS.md

  • lelanthran  16 hours ago

    Is anybody else concerned that we've gone from exactly specifying to a computer, using an exact language, what to do, to a more sophisticated form of prayer?

    • krapp  16 hours ago

      Nah, I'm sure it's fine. What could possibly go wrong with abandoning nearly a hundred years of CS knowledge and hard-won lessons and replacing all of it with the equivalent of trying to convince a sociopathic teenager to clean their room?

  • astrange  18 hours ago

    Something like this seems unlikely to work for a behavior so burned into them. It'd be better to do a second pass to delete all the nonsense comments.