maintainer-review-comment-quality

A pull-request review command that examines added or changed comments, docstrings, and in-code documentation. Docstrings are explanations written alongside code for people who maintain or use it.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to check whether code comments explain important reasons or constraints and follow the project's comment policy.
Why use it?
It helps remove comments that merely repeat the code, contain inaccurate information, or are likely to become outdated.

Command

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add commands/coleam00/archon/maintainer-review-comment-quality
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/coleam00/Archon
Per session 26 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 759 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00026 $0.00759
Opus 5 $0.00013 $0.00380
Sonnet 5 $0.00005 $0.00152
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00076

Measured yesterday against content hash 0cd9a5922a1e, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

maintainer-review-comment-quality scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured yesterday.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

.archon/commands/maintainer-review-comment-quality.md · 96 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 96 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Maintainer Review — Comment Quality

You are a comment / docstring reviewer. Run only when the diff adds or modifies comments, docstrings, JSDoc, or in-code documentation. Your job: keep the code's comments truthful, valuable, and unlikely to rot.

Workflow ID: $WORKFLOW_ID


Phase 1: LOAD

PR_NUMBER=$(cat $ARTIFACTS_DIR/.pr-number)
gh pr diff $PR_NUMBER

Read the project's comment policy in CLAUDE.md:

  • Default to writing no comments.
  • Only add when the WHY is non-obvious (hidden constraint, subtle invariant, workaround).
  • Don't explain WHAT (well-named identifiers do that).
  • Don't reference the current task / fix / callers ("used by X", "added for Y") — those rot.
  • Never write multi-paragraph docstrings or multi-line comment blocks unless absolutely necessary.

Phase 2: ANALYZE

For every added or modified comment in the diff, ask:

Accuracy

  • Does the comment match what the code actually does?
  • If the comment was modified to reflect a code change, does the rest of it still match?

Value

  • Does the comment explain a non-obvious WHY (constraint, invariant, gotcha)?
  • Or does it restate WHAT the code does? (Restating WHAT = comment rot risk.)
  • Does it reference task IDs, callers, or PR numbers that will be meaningless in a year?

Maintenance risk

  • Is the comment likely to drift out of date when the code changes?
  • Is it tied to a specific implementation detail that might be refactored?

Style

  • One short line preferred. Multi-line blocks only when truly necessary.
  • No trailing summaries that just describe the next line.

Phase 3: WRITE FINDINGS

Write $ARTIFACTS_DIR/review/comment-quality-findings.md:

# Comment Quality Review — PR #<n>

## Summary
<1-2 sentences. Comment quality: good / minor-issues / significant-rot-risk.>

## Findings

### HIGH — inaccurate comments (don't match the code)
- **<file:line>**: <description>
  - **Suggested fix**: <update or remove>

### MEDIUM — comment rot risk
- (same format — references that will rot, restated-what-not-why, multi-paragraph fluff)

### LOW — style / consistency
- (same format)

## Comments that are actually valuable
<optionally call out 1-2 cases where the new comments do a great job of capturing non-obvious WHY. Helps reinforce good patterns.>

## Notes for synthesizer
<overlaps with other aspects, or patterns the maintainer should reinforce.>

Read the full file on GitHub · 96 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. yesterday First seen · 96 lines · 26 tokens per session scan A 0cd9a5922a1e

Subscribe to this mod's changes

maintainer-review-comment-quality is a command published in the GitHub repository coleam00/Archon (23,313 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 26 tokens to every session and 759 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.