code-comments

A rule for deciding whether code needs comments, with clear names and surrounding project conventions preferred as the main explanation.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it whenever writing, fixing, refactoring, or scaffolding code in any programming language. It also guides updates to comments made inaccurate by code changes.
Why use it?
It prevents comments that merely repeat the code while preserving comments that explain non-obvious decisions, tradeoffs, or constraints.

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

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 145 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,401 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 $0.00145 $0.01401
Opus 5 $0.00072 $0.00700
Sonnet 5 $0.00029 $0.00280
Haiku 4.5 $0.00015 $0.00140

Measured yesterday against content hash 8a1f693d2093, 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/code/skills/code-comments/SKILL.md · 167 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 167 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Code comments

The default: write no comment

Code plus good naming is the primary form of explanation. A comment is an exception that must earn its place by carrying information a competent reader cannot recover from the code itself.

If you are about to write a comment, the burden is on the comment. Do not write one unless it falls under Warranted below.

Match the surrounding file first

Local convention beats this skill's defaults, always. If the file — or its neighbours — documents every public method, keep documenting them in the same shape. This skill is never a reason to strip comments from a heavily-documented codebase, nor to introduce a documentation style the repo does not use.

Scope

This governs the comments you write. It is not a mandate to delete existing comments in files you happen to touch, and it is not a docs-generation skill. The one exception: if you change code such that an adjacent comment becomes wrong, update or delete that comment — a false comment is worse than none.

Warranted

Write a comment only when it is one of these:

  • Why, not what. A non-obvious decision, tradeoff, or constraint.
    // Cast: the upstream API returns numeric strings for these fields.
    $total = (int) $payload['total'];
    
  • A workaround and its cause, ideally with a link — an upstream bug, a vendor quirk, a spec deviation.
    // Safari fires resize before layout settles; see https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=170595
    requestAnimationFrame(measure);
    
  • Non-obvious consequences. Ordering that matters, a lock that must be held, a side effect a caller would not expect.
    // Must run before Close(): the flush path reads the connection.
    w.Flush()
    
  • Genuinely subtle algorithms or math, or a regex that is not self-evident.
  • Public API contracts, where the language's ecosystem expects them and the file already has them.
  • TODO/FIXME only when the user asked for it or agreed to defer the work. Never a self-issued note about something you skipped — either do it or tell the user in your response.

Read the full file on GitHub · 167 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 · 167 lines · 145 tokens per session scan A 8a1f693d2093

Subscribe to this mod's changes

code-comments is a skill published in the GitHub repository specsnl/agent-specs (2 stars, last pushed 16d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 145 tokens to every session and 1,401 once invoked, about $0.0007 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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