comment-audit

Comment Audit

Audit comments for rot and noise, then apply fixes behind one review gate. Headline principle: no comment is better than a bad comment.

Architecture

ONE read pass over the target files into memory. Then THREE sequential audit passes over that in-memory content — do not re-read files per pass. Collect all findings, present them grouped, gate once, then apply approved edits.

Read-only tools (Read, Grep, Glob, git) during the audit. Make edits only after the gate approves.

Workflow

1. Resolve scope. If the user named files, directories, or a diff, audit those. Otherwise default to the current git diff (git diff --name-only plus staged) and state that you are doing so. Skip generated and vendored files (lockfiles, vendor/, node_modules/, dist/, *.pb.go, *_generated.*, minified assets).
2. Read once. Read each in-scope file fully into memory. This is the only read pass.
3. Run the three passes over the in-memory content. See references/comment-smells.md for the full detection catalog — trigger phrases, why each is harmful, and the remedy per family.
   • Pass 1 — Shifting / meta references.
   • Pass 2 — Temporal anchoring (LLM-authorship smell).
   • Pass 3 — Poor structure / WHAT-not-WHY bloat.
4. Present findings, grouped by pass then by file. Per finding: file:line, the offending comment, which family it hit, and the proposed remedy (delete / rewrite-to-state-constraint / upgrade-to-WHY). Quote the exact replacement for rewrites.
5. Gate once. Call AskUserQuestion with header Review and options Apply / Revise. On Apply, make the edits. On Revise, take the user's adjustments and re-present, then gate again. Do not edit before approval.
6. Apply approved edits and report a one-line-per-file summary of what changed.

Pass summary

Detail and examples live in references/comment-smells.md. Quick map:

• Pass 1 — Shifting / meta references. Comments anchored to identifiers outside the source (issue IDs, spec/RFC sections, task-plan phases) that drift independently and rot into misdirection. Remedy: if the comment's value is the cross-ref, delete it; if it states a real constraint, rewrite to state the constraint directly without the volatile ref.
• Pass 2 — Temporal anchoring. Three sub-families: forward-deferral ("for now", "eventually"), stub-admission ("in a real implementation", "for simplicity"), retro-temporal ("previously", "now we", "as of this change"). Remedies, respectively: do the work or write an auditable TODO with owner + concrete trigger; implement properly or fail loudly (raise/panic/not-implemented); delete — that history belongs in VCS.
• Pass 3 — Poor structure. WHAT-narration that restates the code (// increment i), commented-out code, and stale doc-comments that contradict the code. Remedy: delete pure WHAT-narration and commented-out code; upgrade salvageable comments to state the WHY (rationale, tradeoff, non-obvious constraint, invariant, gotcha); fix doc-comments that lie. Keep comments that explain WHY, or HOW at a level the code can't show.

Rules

• Never delete a comment whose content is a genuine WHY/HOW or a real constraint; instead, rewrite it to drop the volatile anchor while preserving the substance.
• Never silently downgrade a stub into shipped code; instead, implement it or make it fail loudly.
• Never re-read a file mid-pass; instead, operate on the in-memory copy from the single read pass.
• Never apply edits before the gate; instead, present all findings and wait for Apply.
• When a comment's intent is ambiguous (could be WHY or could be noise), flag it as uncertain and propose, but defer to the user at the gate rather than auto-deleting.