code-comments

A guide to deciding when code comments are useful, covering comments for people who call code and comments explaining non-obvious implementation details.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it before writing or editing comments, docstrings, or KDoc, and when reviewing a code change that adds or removes them.
Why use it?
It helps prevent comments that merely repeat the code, while preserving information a future developer would otherwise have to rediscover.

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/juxt/claude-plugins/code-comments
Any agent
npx skills add juxt/claude-plugins --skill code-comments
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/juxt/claude-plugins

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 76 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,540 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 $0.00076 $0.01540
Opus 5 $0.00038 $0.00770
Sonnet 5 $0.00015 $0.00308
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00154

Measured yesterday against content hash 45b0d8bc942d, 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.

plugins/chalk/skills/code-comments/SKILL.md · 113 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 113 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Chalk Code Comments — What Earns a Comment

Interpret MUST, MUST NOT, SHOULD, SHOULD NOT, MAY, etc. per RFC 2119.

Two kinds of comment

An interface comment says what a caller needs in order to use the thing without reading its body. An implementation comment says what the code inside it doesn't already say. Their defaults are opposite, and everything below is about implementation comments unless it says otherwise.

  • An interface comment on a public surface exists by default, and is judged on completeness. Parameters, return, errors, preconditions, units, ownership, thread-safety. A caller who has to read the body to find one of those has been failed.
  • A non-public surface takes implementation rules whatever its markup — a kdoc on a private function still faces the triggers.

The readers

An implementation comment's reader is a competent developer on this project, arriving at this line in a year, mid-investigation of a different bug. They did not read the commit that added it, do not know a change happened here, and will read this line and the twenty around it — nothing else.

Simulate that reader before there's a comment on the screen, not after.

What each clause rules out:

  • "in a year", "did not read the commit" — they have no referent for the change. "Now we…", "instead of…", "this handles the case we hit" say nothing to them.
  • "a different bug" — they want one fact and they're leaving. Orientation, summary and section-label comments cost them and give nothing.
  • "this line and the twenty around it" — nothing that depends on reading elsewhere. No "phase 2 of teardown".

An interface comment's reader is deciding whether to call this, from the signature and the doc alone, and will not read the body.

The triggers

An implementation comment MUST answer yes to one of these, asked of the code rather than of the comment. None applies → no comment. One per way the code under-determines what the reader does next.

Read the full file on GitHub · 113 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 · 113 lines · 76 tokens per session scan A 45b0d8bc942d

Subscribe to this mod's changes

code-comments is a skill published in the GitHub repository juxt/claude-plugins (10 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 76 tokens to every session and 1,540 once invoked, about $0.0004 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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