Comment by ACS_Solver | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ACS_Solver | Hacker News Reader

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I also suspect comments are very much tied to how Claude reasons because not only are they bad comments, I can't get rid of them. Commenting is the one area in which I've been unable to get Claude to respect any rules. It can follow code conventions I prefer, it can do other things, but it can't keep the comment volume down.

My CLAUDE.md has rules about not including any redundant comments in the code that are obvious from the code itself. I reiterate that occasionally while working. It's absolutely disregarded and any Claude-written code is full of comments. Some of them are simply redundant, like "Collect Foos and pass them to the requested sink" on a function that's void CollectFoos(IFooSink sink). But worse, many comments include in the moment reasoning like "added parameter bar because we can no longer use the frob to automatically derive bar". That's stuff for a commit message, or just a mental note, and absolutely not for comments.

I haven't found any way to stop Claude from doing these, so I have to tell Claude afterwards to clean the comments up. Which it does, making a note in memory to comment less, and it still does the exact same thing next time.

> Commenting is the one area in which I've been unable to get Claude to respect any rules.

Exactly my experience! Since the release of Opus 5, no amount of instructions helps. In CLAUDE.md, in a separate file, in memory, as brief bullets, as long detailed guides, with reasoning from medium to max — nothing.

Even worse, recently, after getting another opus in a tiny bugfix session, I prompted directly, "drop the comments from the current code changes" — Claude instead just slightly trimmed them. I couldn't believe my eyes.

I have a relatively low bar for prose, could live with some junk. But Claude's comments are _poisonous_. They always require maintenance, instantly become out of sync with the actual code, and are a token black hole — for all agents, but especially for Claude itself.

Gave up and canceled Anthropic subscription yesterday. To my taste, it has become unusable for coding.

> Even worse, recently, after getting another opus in a tiny bugfix session, I prompted directly, "drop the comments from the current code changes" — Claude instead just slightly trimmed them. I couldn't believe my eyes.

For me, Claude knows how I want the comments due to all the memories and CLAUDE.md, so funnily it's now enough with even a brief groan from me like "Come on, the comments" and then Claude goes through its recent additions and fixes comments quite well per my long-term instructions. But only ever during an extra pass that I initiate, never during the initial writing of the code.

> But worse, many comments include in the moment reasoning like "added parameter bar because we can no longer use the frob to automatically derive bar". That's stuff for a commit message, or just a mental note, and absolutely not for comments.

I've noticed this a lot, and before your remark I couldn't put my finger on what was wrong. Now I know: Claude is writing its thought processes and maybe parts of the conversation it had with you as comments in the code!

I always end up manually trimming those comments, which is cumbersome.

It also loves to reference internal notes and scratch docs that never go into source control, so a reader will have no idea what it’s talking about. For example:

    // load_tree() loads the binary tree with data, but only the recently updated data, not all data (INTERNAL_NOTES.md section 4)

Ok but nobody reading the source code knows what this doc is. You don’t have to cite it.

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