code-comments

A writing guide for comments in source code, including API documentation such as docstrings and Rust or Linux kernel documentation. It focuses on explaining intent, reasons, invariants, or hazards that the code itself cannot show clearly.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when deciding whether a comment is needed, or when writing, editing, or reviewing code comments and API documentation.
Why use it?
It helps prevent comments that merely repeat the code or become misleading when the code changes.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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 skills/chucklever/cel-kdev/code-comments
Any agent
npx skills add chucklever/cel-kdev --skill code-comments
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/chucklever/cel-kdev

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 109 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,964 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 $0.00109 $0.03964
Opus 5 $0.00055 $0.01982
Sonnet 5 $0.00022 $0.00793
Haiku 4.5 $0.00011 $0.00396

Measured yesterday against content hash a2d2bc420458, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

code-comments 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.

plugin/cel-prose/skills/code-comments/SKILL.md · 361 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 361 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Code comments: voice and verbosity

Core principle

The first tool for making code understandable is the code, not the comment. Write the function so its working is obvious -- by naming, structure, decomposition, named constants -- and most comments become unnecessary before you type them. Kernel coding-style is emphatic: "it's much better to write the code so that the working is obvious." A comment is the fallback for what the code cannot be made to carry, not the first move.

For the residue that naming and structure cannot express -- an intent, a rationale, a load-bearing invariant, a hazard -- say the non-obvious thing and stop. A comment that restates the code has a cost: it adds maintenance and goes stale the first time the code changes underneath it.

Start at zero

The starting state is no comments. Not "comment as you go, then prune" -- commenting as you go produces narration, and pruning your own narration is the check that never happens. Work in this order:

  1. Write the code complete and bare. No comments at all, not even placeholders. Name things precisely while you do it.
  2. Reread it as someone who has never seen it. Note where you actually stumble: a constant with no story, an ordering that looks arbitrary, a branch whose reason is offstage.
  3. Fix what the code can fix. Each stumble gets the code-first treatment below before it gets a comment.
  4. Add comments only for what survives -- the always-comment floor, plus the facts step 2 surfaced that step 3 could not absorb.

Every comment is now an addition you chose and can name a reason for. If you cannot say which floor item or which surviving fact a comment covers, it does not go in.

Entering mid-stream: when the code is already drafted and already carries comments, delete the ones you wrote and rejoin at step 2. Comments that were in the file before you touched it are the reader's context, not yours to defend -- judging those is review, and references/reviewing.md governs it.

Read the full file on GitHub · 361 lines

Files

What ships with it

5 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

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 · 361 lines · 109 tokens per session scan A a2d2bc420458

Subscribe to this mod's changes

code-comments is a skill published in the GitHub repository chucklever/cel-kdev (2 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 109 tokens to every session and 3,964 once invoked, about $0.0005 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 2026-08-31.

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