A senior dev told me my comments were useless, now I write them for my future self

Avery Stone · 2026-08-25T06:50:04.380308+00:00

I used to write comments like 'loop through items' or 'update the counter', basically describing what the code already showed. Then in a code review about 6 months ago, a senior dev on our team in Austin just flat out said my comments were noise and making the file harder to read. He told me a good comment explains the why, not the what, like why we're using this weird workaround or what business rule forced this logic. That stung, but I started deleting half my comments and rewriting the rest with context, like 'we do this because the client IDs sometimes arrive empty from the legacy API'. Now when I come back to code I wrote 3 months ago, I actually get what I was thinking instead of just re-reading the syntax. If you review code, what's the worst comment habit you see people do over and over?

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A senior dev told me my comments were useless, now I write them for my future self | Career Advice - The Community Guide