Agreed this makes much more sense, from both a UX perspective as well as a code-cleanliness perspective.
There's also the AI evolution question. When we have GPT-10 next year, do we go through and regenerate all the comments? That would introduce a lot of noise into the repo's commit history and `git blame`, which I think is another indicator that the repo is not the right place to store this sort of thing. (And it'd have to be done again every time the AI got smarter...)
Having the AI perched on your shoulder and just analyzing the code as you look at it seems much simpler. Like a friendly, modern version of the pirate's parrot.
> There's also the AI evolution question. When we have GPT-10 next year, do we go through and regenerate all the comments? That would introduce a lot of noise into the repo's commit history and `git blame`, which I think is another indicator that the repo is not the right place to store this sort of thing.
Counterpoint: comments in code reflect what the writer thought at the time of their generation - whether they were a human or an AI (and, excepting automated stupidity, there would be a human reviewing and accepting AI-generated comments). "Having the AI perched on your shoulder" is like re-reading and re-interpreting what the code means. You get the benefit of experience (and improved AI models), but you'll also miss the context, long lost to time since the code in question was written.
I'd say, we should to both. And code cleanliness... we won't make much more progress here than we've already made, not until we stop coding directly in the final, plaintext source form. There are too many conflicting concerns wrt. readability, and you can't have them individually optimized at the same time in a single piece of text.
Wow, thanks for the insightful discussion and feedback! This is definitely something that we will take into consideration and ideally, provide as an option.
Would it be so bad on git blame? Assuming all/nearly all comments are on their own lines, I would not expect that part to be a problem. The main problem I would see would be finding a way to merge in such a huge PR with lots of people actively working in these files, so there would be a lot of “merge conflicts” each time people tried to land their branches after one of these mega-comment-PRs went in.
There's also the AI evolution question. When we have GPT-10 next year, do we go through and regenerate all the comments? That would introduce a lot of noise into the repo's commit history and `git blame`, which I think is another indicator that the repo is not the right place to store this sort of thing. (And it'd have to be done again every time the AI got smarter...)
Having the AI perched on your shoulder and just analyzing the code as you look at it seems much simpler. Like a friendly, modern version of the pirate's parrot.