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View original post on X: laurenX· 14/100AI score14/100

Lauren Tan urges banning most code comments to stop agents copying them

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Lauren Tan (@poteto) says agents copy existing code comments, so temporary workaround notes spread through codebases and should mostly be removed.

She recommends pstack's /no-comments skill to find and prune useless comments while keeping ones that explain real quirks, such as a browser quirk.

She also suggests a prompt that uses a swarm to identify comments to prune and recommend refactoring or deletion for each workaround.

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laurenVerified on X
@poteto

ban and delete most if not all code comments!

agents love copying what already exists. a seemingly harmless comment explaining some temporary workaround is one of the worst viruses you can have in your codebase. like a weed it'll spread quickly as a tool for agents to quickly get their job done. before you know it, your codebase is overrun with hacks and stale comments. just one more workaround bro

you can use pstack's /no-comments skill as a weedkiller. it'll seek out useless comments while keeping the ones that actually should exist (like explaining a browser quirk), and figure out how to solve them on a first principles basis

here's a prompt you can try asking @bot:

create a project agent that uses /poteto-mode to spawn a /swarm to use /no-comments and identify useless code comments we can prune in my repo. come back with a high level plan of which of these workarounds would be best solved by refactoring and which we can straight up delete

https://x.ai/bot/plugin/9717366

Source: lauren · x.comPublished · added here