It reminds me of something I've always wanted as a coder but never cared enough to implement, which would be a verbosity switch.
I see the full multi-paragraph comments in my codebases and get annoyed but also feel like the additional context helps improve the llm results over time because that history helps it know what's been tried and removed in the past. It's additional context for the system that improves with context.
The feature I want in the code tool itself (for me) is to adjust how verbose the comments are so I can read "just code", then "terse comments" then "full comments" then "full comments with historical context" (including fit commits and ticket references) and finally, full-on literate programming. And I'd like to switch between on the fly as I read through the code.
I think this is something we could actually produce with llms, and I feel the ability to switch between these modes would help the llm as well.
Sometimes I just need to see what's being done. Sometimes I need to know why. Sometimes I need to know what's been tried. Never always all of these things. And expecting to find this context in git comments doesn't feel right either.
What you want can be accomplished with an extra doc, call it the Log, where the llm appends things tried, lessons learned, failed experiments etc.. while leaving the comments as terse accurate snapshot of the current state. I've been using this log pattern and it works well.
I see the full multi-paragraph comments in my codebases and get annoyed but also feel like the additional context helps improve the llm results over time because that history helps it know what's been tried and removed in the past. It's additional context for the system that improves with context.
The feature I want in the code tool itself (for me) is to adjust how verbose the comments are so I can read "just code", then "terse comments" then "full comments" then "full comments with historical context" (including fit commits and ticket references) and finally, full-on literate programming. And I'd like to switch between on the fly as I read through the code.
I think this is something we could actually produce with llms, and I feel the ability to switch between these modes would help the llm as well.
Sometimes I just need to see what's being done. Sometimes I need to know why. Sometimes I need to know what's been tried. Never always all of these things. And expecting to find this context in git comments doesn't feel right either.