Agents and I apparently have a whole lot in common.
Only being half ironic with this. I generally find that people somehow magically manage to understand how to be materially helpful when the subject is a helpless LLM. Instead of pointing it to a random KB page, they give it context. They then shorten that context. They then interleave context as comments. They provide relevant details. They go out of their way to collect relevant details. Things they somehow don't do for their actual colleagues.
This only gets worse when the LLM captures all that information better than certain human colleagues somehow, rewarding the additional effort.
Right? It's infuriating. Nearly all of the agentic coding best practices are things that we should have just been doing all along, because it turns out humans function better too when given the proper context for their work. The only silver lining is that this is a colossal karmic retribution for the orgs that never gave a shit about this stuff until LLMs.
> It's infuriating. Nearly all of the agentic coding best practices are things that we should have just been doing all along
There's a good reason why we didn't though: because we didn't see any obvious value in it. So it felt like a waste of time. Now it feels like time well spent.
> Only being half ironic with this. I generally find that people somehow magically manage to understand how to be materially helpful when the subject is a helpless LLM. Instead of pointing it to a random KB page, they give it context. They then shorten that context. They then interleave context as comments. They provide relevant details. They go out of their way to collect relevant details. Things they somehow don't do for their actual colleagues.
"Self-descriptive code doesn't need comments!" always gets an eye-roll from me
Huh. It's displayed taking up three cells in my terminal, but laid out as if its width were one cell. Irritating. I wonder if there are any other grapheme clusters that don't properly fit in two cells?
Meanwhile, some colleagues: "Code should have as little comments as possible, the code should explain itself." (conceptually not wholly wrong, but it can only explain HOW not WHY and even then often insufficiently) all while having barebones/empty README.md files more often than not. Fun times.
Comments are great until they diverge from the code. The "no comments, just self-explanatory code" reaction comes from the trauma of having to read hundreds of lines of comments only to discover they have nothing to do with how the code actually works, because over time the code has received updates but the comments haven't. In that case it's better to just have no comments or documentation of any kind--less cognitive overhead. This is a symptom of broken culture, but the breakage is the same kind that has managers salivating over LLM vibeslop. So I totally get where your colleagues might be coming from. Working within the confines of how things actually are it could be totally reasonable.
This is honestly such a bad argument against comments.
I'm gonna note down my reasons for doing things and other information I deem useful, and if some other dipshit 5 years from now when I've moved on comes along and starts changing everything up without keeping the comments up to date that's their problem not mine. There was never anything wrong with my comments, the only thing that's wrong is the dipshit messing things up.
Doesn't matter what I do, the dipshit is going to mess everything up anyway. Those outdated comments will be the least of their worries.
IME unfortunately that's not actually the case. It very much is your problem, as the architect of the original system, unless you can get yourself transferred to a department far, far away. I've never managed that except by leaving the company.
To be clear, I don't believe it should be this way, but sadly unless you work in an uncommonly well run company it usually is.
I really can't imagine this ever becoming a real problem. Not once have I ever worked in a place where any kind of leadership would ever give a shit about comments nor anything else in the code itself. The lowest level leadership has ever gone is click a button to see if it works.
And if anyone has a problem with comments existing it's trivial to find/replace them out of existence. Literally a one minute job, if you actually think the codebase would be better without them.
This is such a humongous non-issue it's crazy man.
Leadership doesn't need to give a shit about the code to cause the cultural defect that leads to comments not being maintained. All they need to do is set the conditions which prevent code owners from having the agency to reject shoddy work. In my experience this always happens. It can manifest as either:
(1) "flat" organization where everyone owns everything and therefore nobody has the authority to reject a PR
or (2) "rubber stamp" culture where people who reject shoddy work are "not a team player" and therefore performance defective.
So far every company I've worked at has one or both of these symptoms. Working in the confines of those systems, it's not an irrational choice to decide that comments and other forms of documentation aren't worth trying to maintain, and are therefore detrimental.
I provide feedback on PRs. Then the owner of the PR adjusts it to accommodate my feedback and once I'm happy with it I approve it and we merge. If you're working in a place so cancerous that you can't just leave a comment on a PR reminding someone to update the comment they forgot to update I don't know why you're still there. This is called code review and it's common practice. If all you ever do is approve PRs then you're not doing code review and you might as well skip the whole PR step and let people merge into main as they please.
In any case your argument still just boils down to "I work with a bunch of stupid lazy dipshits" so why bother doing anything at all then? Write comments, don't write comments, write tests, don't write tests, do whatever the fuck you want because you're surrounded by useless dipshits and nothing you do matters anyway. Might as well write some comments for your own sake, everything's a ball of mud anyway it doesn't matter.
I'm gonna keep doing what I think is right in my sane corner of the world. And honestly I don't believe you. I think these excuses are just that. Excuses. I've been around quite a bit and haven't seen anything like you describe. Sure there's plenty of lazy dipshits but you don't have to sink to their level.
You may be a bit overconfident about how clear you will be with your comments.
The “dipshit” doesn’t mess everything up for fun. They don’t understand the comments written by the previous “dipshit” and thus are unable to update the comments.
Oh really? I'm overconfident in my ability to write and read simple clear text notes?
Here's what I think. I think you guys heard the "self-documenting code" BS and ate it up, and now you're grasping at straws to defend your cargo cult position, inventing these "problems" to justify it.
If you're looking at some code and there's a comment saying something that doesn't make sense to you, maybe that's a clue that you're missing a puzzle piece and should take a step back maybe talk to some people to make sure you're not messing things up? Maybe, for a non-dipshit, that comment they don't understand could actually be helpful if they put some effort into it?
Also just to be clear I don't think this is a likely occurrence unless someone doesn't know squat about the codebase at all - my comments generally assume very little knowledge. That's their whole purpose - to inform someone (possibly me) coming there without the necessary background knowledge.
It just isn't feasible to include the why of everything in the code itself. And it sure as hell is better to include some info as comments than none at all. Otherwise a bug will often be indistinguishable from a feature.
And I don't think dipshits mess things up for fun. I think they just suck. They're lazy and stupid, as most developers are. If I'm there I can use reviews etc to help them suck less, if I'm not they're free to wreck my codebase with reckless abandon and nothing I do will make any difference. I cannot safeguard my codebase against that so there's no point in trying and the fact that this is your argument should make you stop and reconsider your position because it's far fetched as fuck.
I’ll also note that I’ve worked with developers who didn't like git blame because someone might misinterpret the results. I think some people want excuses for poor work, rather than just working as correctly as possible.
Or how would you name methods and variables to explain why some payment reconciliation process skips matching for transactions under 0.50 EUR and just auto-approves them, because the external payment processor rounds differently than the internal ledger at sub-euro amounts, creating mismatches that were flooding the finance team's exception queue in 2013, explained more under Jira issue ZXSV-12456 and more details are known by j.doe@myorg.com. The threshold was chosen after analyzing six months of false positives, when it's any higher someone being undercharged doesn't get caught. I don't think autoApproveThreshold = 0.50 or anything like that would get the full context across, even if the rules themselves are all code.
I think surely you can have both! Code should explain itself as often as possible, but when you hit a wall due to some counter-intuitive workarounds being needed, or some business rules or external considerations that you need to keep track of, then comments also make sense. Better than just putting everything in a Jira issue somewhere, given that it often won't be read by you or others and almost certainly will not be read by any AI agents (unless you have an MCP or something, but probably uncommon), or spending hours trying to get the code to explain something it will never explain well. I've had people ask me about things that are covered in the README.md instead of reading it.
You’ve correctly identified that naming isn’t sufficient for all communication. Name the things that stay constant in the code and explain the things that vary with a particular implementation in version control messages. Version control as a medium communicates what context the message was written for, which is far more appropriate than comments.
> Name the things that stay constant in the code and explain the things that vary with a particular implementation in version control messages.
Then the question becomes how often we look in the version control history for the files that we want to touch.
Which of these is more likely:
A) someone digging into the full history of autoApproveThreshold and finding out that they need to contact j.doe@myorg.com or reference ZXSV-12456
B) or them just messing the implementation with changes due to not reviewing the history of every file they touch
If someone is doing a refactor of 20 files, they probably won't review the histories of all of those, especially if the implementation is spread around a bunch of years, doubly so if there are a bunch of "fixes" commit messages in the middle, merge commits and so on. I've seen people missing out on details that are in the commit log many, many times, to the point where I pretty much always reach for comments. Same goes for various AI tools and agents.
Furthermore, if you want to publish a bit of code somewhere (e.g. Teams/Slack channel, or a blog), you'd need to go out of your way to pull in the relevant history as well and then awkwardly copy it in as well, since you won't always be giving other people a Git repo to play around with.
It's not that I don't see your point, it's just that from where I stand with those assumptions a lot of people are using version control as a tool wrong and this approach neither works now, nor will work well for them in the future.
It's more or less the same issue as with docs in some Wiki site or even a separate Markdown file (which is better than nothing, definitely closer than a Wiki, especially if the audience is someone who wants an overview of a particular part of the codebase, or some instructions for processes that don't just concern a few files; but it's still far removed from where any actual code changes would be made, also a downside of ADRs sometimes).
But you will also fail to keep the comments and code synchronized, and the comment will at some point no longer describe why the code is doing whatever it does
Which is why you're reviewing changes. I haven't memorized what every line of code does, if it was worth commenting then it was confusing-enough that it needed the comment and so I'll read the comment to make sense of the code being changed. If I don't read the comment that means the comment was too far from the confusing code.
Alternately, you can say the same about informative variable names or informative function names. "If I change the function then the name is no longer accurate". You don't say that because function names and variable names are short and clear and are close to the problem at hand. Do the same with comments.
Which is why the copilot hyper-verbosity is harmful. Comments need to be terse so your eyes don't filter them out as noise.
This is also a great way to ensure the documentation is up to date. It’s easier to fix the comment while you’re in the code just below it than to remember “ah yes I have to update docs/something.md because I modified src/foo/bar.ts”.
People moving docs out of code are absolutely foolish because no one is going to remember to update it consistently but the agent always updates comments in the line of sight consistently.
Agent is not going to know to look for a file to update unless instructed. Now your file is out of sync. Code comments keeping everything line of sight makes it easy and foolproof.
Experience doesn’t leave me with any confidence that the long term memory will be useful for long. Our agentic code bases are a few months old, wait a few years for those comments to get out of date and then see how much it helps.
The great thing about agentic coding is you can define one whose entire role is to read a diff, look in contextual files for comments, and verify whether they’re still accurate.
You don’t have to rely on humans doing it. The agent’s entire existence is built around doing this one mundane task that is annoying but super useful.
Yes, lets blow another 5-10k a project/month on tokens to keep the comments up to date. The fact ai still cannot consistently refactor without leaving dead code around even after a self review does not give me confidence in comments…
Comments in code are often a code smell. This is an industry standard for a reason and isnt because of staleness. If u are writing a comment, it means the code is bad or there is irreducible complexity. It is about good design. Comments everywhere are almost always a flag.
I think a big question is whether one wants your agent to know the reason for all the reasons for guidelines you issue or whether you want the agent to just follow the guidelines you issue. Especially, giving an agent the argument for your orders might make the agent think that can question and so not follow those arguments.
> If you're not using comments, you're doing agent coding wrong.
Comments are ultimately so you can understand stuff without having to read all the code. LLMs are great when you force them to read all code, and comments only serve to confuse. I'd say the opposite been true in my experience, if you're not forcing LLMs to not have any comments at all (and it can actually skip those, looking at you Gemini), you're doing agent coding wrong.
You're wasting context re-specifying what the code should already say, defining an implementation once should be enough, otherwise try another model that can correctly handle programming.
Why? Agents may or may not read docs. It may or may not use skills or tools. It will always read comments "in the line of sight" of the task.
You get free long term agent memory with zero infrastructure.