I just wrote a utility to rip all comments out of the code. Now the code is fully uncommented and it has saved lots of input tokens and also lots of meandering because the model is no longer getting stuck on bad ideas it told itself about.
replyThat's is something I did not consider, the model using the existing comments as input. Comments that it may itself have written.
replyI set a line budget for comments (also wiki page parts, chat responses, etc). That only helps when I ask it to do a second pass to reword everything to the budget and add links. I think they tuned it this way to stash reasoning dumps in the code. Unlike human developers, it has no context in its head, other than general GitHub knowledge.
replyThat is a dramatic shortcoming, but I fix it with permalinks to other files. https://replicated.live/blog/link