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Comment by ljlolel | Hacker News Reader

Would take a few seconds to clean up or add comments anyway with Claude if it didn’t do it already automatically

Do you have an example of such comments? Maybe I'm wrong but I get the feeling that AI-generated comments would be mostly along the lines of beginner-level comments:

  // Don't do this if there's more than 1
  if (foo.length <= 1) {
    foo.bar;
  }

Comments which are helpful usually explain why something is done. That's usually to accommodate specific business rules which the AI isn't likely to know about at this stage.

  // This is due to a change Accounting requested because ...
  if (foo.length <= 1) {
    foo.bar;
  }

Have you tried it? It is very good at explaining and commenting code — better than my comments.

Admittedly, I've not tried it which is why I'm curious. I would expect that it's good at explaining well-studied algorithms but anything that's following more-or-less bespoke business rules seems like a different beast.

Again, I could be wrong; e.g., a banking application might have certain regulations it needs to follow making non-computer-technical reasons for certain things to be done. That would be a good candidate for a "helpful" comment which would be reasonably AI-generated. (Although, perhaps not a good candidate for an LLM-generated application.) The example of "our specific business wants this for reasons" is one that I think LLMs would struggle with unless that's included in the context window. Of course, that's also possible; not sure if that is presumed.

It’s 2024. It’s free to try. Try it out. It’s astounding.

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