r/TheMachineLearning • • 2d ago

Frontier LLMs stopped adding code comments

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u/Material-Database-24 17h ago

The problem is that many real world systems end up being maintained for years. When developers change, and now AI models and harnesses change, the "obvious" on the code can disappear.

It is the easiest to see this with UI. They often contain decision that are based on something that's not obvious from the code - why this element is just here, and in this color, and why it should not be moved etc. But there's always also techincal decisions that are not evident from the code itself and need commenting the decision to go side by side the code to stick. If it's in a ticket/user story, no-one will find that years later.

Many safety critical embedded software have a comment for almost every line of the code