Humans were 'ere 2026 · Spuutr blog

I heard this last week on a call with leading engineers from SpaceXAI (Cursor). They specifically ban commenting in code.

The logic was cold. Comments become redundant artefacts. They go stale. Then the AI has to keep rewriting them to match reality, which burns tokens. When nobody maintains them, the stale comment becomes a second, lying spec and steers the next agent into a ditch.

Until recently I was doing the opposite. Comments. READMEs. Repo maps. Intent notes so the next human could find their way. I thought that was craft.

Now I am not sure who the audience is.

Is the comment for the next engineer? For the agent? For the PR reviewer who will skim 400 lines in eight minutes? Or is it just noise?

This is not a new idea. In 1974 Kernighan said the only reliable documentation of a program is the code itself. Clean Code already pushed "why" over "what." So why did so many of us go all-in on commenting anyway? What does code hygiene even mean now if half the prose next to the code is unmaintained?

Who is still writing comments in code? Who is actually reading them and getting value? Or are most of us skimming past them because we already know they lie?

What changed is the reader. Agents treat comments as ground truth at scale. Drift is no longer a human inconvenience. It is poison in the loop.

The industry numbers are getting weird either way. AI-shaped pull requests are larger. Review queues are jammed. And once a review starts, the biggest AI-assisted changes often get less deep time than smaller human ones. Volume up. Attention thin. Approve-and-move-on as a coping mechanism.

So the debate:
- Ban narrative comments and treat stale docs as bugs that poison agents?
- Keep only "why" / provenance / invariants the code cannot express?
- Or move truth upstream into specs and ADRs, and treat code as derived?
- If ADRs and docs are generated and tests encode the invariants, what is the residual value of the human PR?
- And whether "code is all the context you need" is the right line, or just the loudest one.

Discuss.

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