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LPisGood 2 hours ago

My coworkers continue to dump hundreds of lines of AI documentation in every PR and every other line of code has between one and ten lines of AI generated comments, talking about the real unlock and how things are byte for byte identical on the load bearing path or how the acceptance ladder is misleading.

Features are coming out and metrics are improving, but we’re basically in a post readability code base, with the occasional performative comment about a variable name.

I don’t really know how to address this situation or if it needs addressed. I certainly don’t read the long-winded AI comments or the AI documentation, but perhaps it’s useful for the AI on its next pass.

noman-land 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Have you considered talking about it? You're in a professional environment collectively working in a new way with a group of people. It's up to somebody to have opinions about what does and doesn't suck. If you silently go along and don't say anything you're dooming yourself and all of us to a lifetime of this garbage.

corndoge 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Fighting the ocean is futile

delecti an hour ago | parent | next [-]

It's not the ocean, it's the poster's own team. A simple "AI comments suck" in a sprint retro would be trivially easy and would at least start the conversation.

swat535 a few seconds ago | parent | next [-]

You're going to have convince upper management why the team's velocity is suddenly affected in feature releases once they stop using PR.

All the execs know that they can refresh the screen faster and see the features for marketing and sales.

When has engineering ever had a voice anyway? The bean counters have been looking to cut us out since the inception of our industry.

stronglikedan 29 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Doesn't matter. You'll come off as the baddie. It's the foreseeable future. Best just to learn how to interpret AI generated shit, or learn how to run it through AI and have it translate it to a more concise format without all the buzzwords. It'll take getting used to, but it'll save your career.

VohuMana 41 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

I think the biggest issue might not be the immediate team but upper leadership. Companies which have mandated AI usage override a lot of what an individual or individual team wants. If that’s the case then it would be a lot like fighting the ocean, especially if your immediate team sees having AI write docs as an easy way to move the needle on LT’s AI monitoring dashboard.

trip-zip an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

So is completely eliminating litter, but I still pick it up when I pass it.

a34729t an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Literally pissing in an ocean of piss.

anon7725 an hour ago | parent [-]

Analogy-wise, wouldn't it be adding a cup of water to an ocean of piss?

LPisGood an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yes, talking about it repeatedly has been my process. Individual PRs have been changed but the 4 the next day look the same. The typical response is that they did change the (massive and wordy) PR overview from what AI said, even if it was obviously a minimal change at best. I can’t really argue against lying and going through and picking out every LLMism is not so productive in my opinion.

I don’t have time to go through and flag everything or even read the thousands of lines of code changes that are happening.

2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]
[deleted]
aaaronic 24 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

My "favorite" Claudism is when I critique its work and ask it to remove some unnecessary part of the design -- and then the diff has more green than red because it added comments about why the code is no longer there -- the code that was never in the mainline and never asked for!

_--__--__ a few seconds ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah this is awful. Every codebase becomes a graveyard of references to ideas or behaviors that were barely considered. It's probably also a compounding source of context poisoning when a minority of the comments/documentation are about how the current code actually works.

koyote 14 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

It's not just claude, all AI is unable to produce something concise. On the surface everything looks 'good' whether code or prose, but then if you dig a bit, try and understand the whole text you quickly realise that 80% of it is unecessary and the whole thing could have been re-worded/re-coded into something a fraction of its size and complexity.

I asked Sol to reduce the length of some documentation we had by making it more concise. It came back after 20 minutes of work, did a line count and was aghast that the line count had somehow increased...

joshmoody24 39 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

My team uses a Claude Code hook that blocks any comment more than 2 lines long, and when tripped it encourages the agent to rewrite the comment more concisely and focus only on the "why" not the "what" of the code. I've found this extremely useful for code reviews.

Fordec 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I have five enforcement mechanisms: 1000 line max edit, PR comment character limits (get to the point of your description), ISO 24495 conformance check, and enforced code line citation that must exist, be a function declaration for the start of all paragraphs and inline commentary must be three lines or less and inline comments contribute max 10% of the PR. Fail any of these, automatic PR denial with no human intervention.

LPisGood 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This sound pretty good, but every single attempt to put an actual character limit meets incredible resistance on my team. ISO 24495 looks interesting, how do you enforce that? Do you have some agent?

Fordec an hour ago | parent [-]

Table of words LLM generated, Binary Searched on the output going forward and local skill/CLAUDE.md line with instruction to conform. The comparison then is pretty fast due to the word limitation rules. Also standardized PR format so a bunch of what a dev would usually communicate is just a series of checkboxes and a place for adding an optional link for "additional discussion" on slack as the escape hatch for people who like to waffle.

CSMastermind an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> ISO 24495 conformance check

How do you enforce that?

Fordec an hour ago | parent [-]

Binary Searched against a table of words. It's rough at first, but once you add contextual exceptions the false positives calm down. Also the CLAUDE.md file has an instruction to conform before even submitting the PR and there's a skill too for it to self iterate.

dimgl 21 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Congratulations: now only AI can iterate on your codebase!

rfgplk 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Prune the comments? Instruct the LLM to print less comments (this one is genuinely hard though). What's really happening is that you don't have a strong enough review process (or a code standards process) to offset this. The one issue I see with this is that your team is almost certainly _NOT_ doing any kind of code review (especially if they're leaving comments like that). The other problem is that excessive comments actually harm LLM output, I've done tons of A/B testing, and pruning comments actually helps LLMs spot bugs, among other things.

EastSmith 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I dump AI output in PRs, because it ads context for the AI reviewer.

giancarlostoro 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Honestly, if you saved a ton of hours with the model coding for you, at least give me 30 minutes of your own words, show me you know what you're shipping, if you can't do that, then I don't know if I want to approve the PR. My first job we always did peer review in a meeting room when a PR looked a little too much, you can't exactly bring in GPT into a meeting so its a good time to ask simple questions about the change to ensure you understand it just as much as they do.

fragmede an hour ago | parent [-]

> you can't exactly bring in GPT into a meeting

They totally gotta be doing that at OpenAI. Meeting invitees: You, co-workers, GPT 5.6.

giancarlostoro an hour ago | parent [-]

Well yeah, they'll keep burning the VC bucks.

cuddlyogre an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You forgot the smoke tests that passed.

sebastiennight an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Am I the only one who's had Claude almost systematically remove human-written comments?

It might be touching one line of actual code in a file, and take advantage of it to remove 20+ lines of actual useful comments.

Everybody is talking about the opposite, so I'm wondering if this is rare.

MattGrommes an hour ago | parent [-]

I've definitely seen this. One of my least favorite parts of developing with AI is when I add print statements or small changes and the LLM removes them in the process of doing the next thing. I want to work _with_ the AI, not have it stomp all over my code.

aaaronic 19 minutes ago | parent [-]

Do you think it's actively deciding to remove them or just not noticing you added them and then overwriting?

I ask because when I started informing it I made personal edits, it stopped doing this kind of thing so often and let me work _with_ it more.

My saved prompt now says never to assume a file has not been edited since the last time it was read between prompts.

BeetleB 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's a code review, right?

Give feedback that about the docs and block merging till the issue is resolved.

LPisGood an hour ago | parent [-]

This sounds easy in principle, but a half dozen of these sort sorts of massive PR’s per week is basically untenable. I’m not gonna read the hundreds of lines of added documentation to decide if they’re correct or not. The price of generating new words is just so much higher than the price of evaluating it that I can’t be bothered.

BeetleB 43 minutes ago | parent [-]

> but a half dozen of these sort sorts of massive PR’s per week is basically untenable.

Actually, rejecting them is precisely what will make them easy.

"Sorry, the comments are so bad I'm stopping here. Please fix them and then I'll resume the code review."

You're giving everybody (including yourself) more work by:

1. Reviewing the code (even if you skip the documentation).

2. Letting too many abstruse comments in which everyone in the team will have to read.

3. Allowing the behavior to continue.

Become the bottleneck so the team can talk about it. If they decide this shouldn't be a blocker, just declare you won't review the comments going forward.

mawadev 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Just wait until you see vibe contracts, vibe requirements and vibe legal documents

moltar 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I address it with AI.

Write REVIEW.md.

I have CC check itself pretty well.

I also put into agent/claude/review instructions to write using simple English skill and humanizer skill. Then not to write redundant comments.

It’s not perfect but definitely catches lots of slop.

rfgplk 2 hours ago | parent [-]

It's actually insanely difficult to get LLMs not to produce comments. Even with explicit "NEVER LEAVE ANY COMMENTS WHATSOEVER", they still do, across basically all providers.

golergka 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> perhaps it’s useful for the AI on its next pass

Yes, that's the entire point. And it is extremely useful. Why wouldn't I want this?

minus7 an hour ago | parent [-]

Is it really, or do you just think so and it could actually mislead you and your LLM the next time? In my experience, the information in the comments tends to be quite redundant, often even with other comments in the same file