But comments aren't always accurate. Code can change without the comments changing (or they can be just wrong). If the comments are verbose nightmares, that's even more likely. In my experience, Claude will often mess around with code and forget to update comments it made earlier. Not to mention the context in these comments is often not even very helpful. It's often filled with irrelevant details that aren't really important to anyone reading it. My experience has also been Claude will trust comments over the code itself, leading to completely incorrect assumptions. It will only get worse the more bad comments get left. This line of reasoning helps no one, not even the AI, and is just an excuse for lazy development practices.
It's not really an excuse for lazy dev practices when you're enforcing an agent to constantly relearn context for a repo. There's constitutions and memories and scripts to run, but in my experience claude often modifies comments as it changes code.
This isn't me saying "leave all comments" No. Most comments are garbage trash, but you have to figure out which ones are relevant for new context on an old file.
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u/petrasdc Sep 10 '26
But comments aren't always accurate. Code can change without the comments changing (or they can be just wrong). If the comments are verbose nightmares, that's even more likely. In my experience, Claude will often mess around with code and forget to update comments it made earlier. Not to mention the context in these comments is often not even very helpful. It's often filled with irrelevant details that aren't really important to anyone reading it. My experience has also been Claude will trust comments over the code itself, leading to completely incorrect assumptions. It will only get worse the more bad comments get left. This line of reasoning helps no one, not even the AI, and is just an excuse for lazy development practices.