{"slug": "ask-hn-formatting-guidelines-for-llm-comments", "title": "Ask HN: Formatting Guidelines for LLM Comments", "summary": "A Hacker News user asked whether any prompt or system exists to enforce consistent code-comment formatting across large language models, citing tedious manual cleanup of LLM-generated comments before committing code to production. The user noted that LLMs comment inconsistently, with some styles preferable to others, and proposed strict guidelines on what to comment and what not to comment that would work across all LLMs. The Ask HN post, submitted at news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49790384, had 1 point and 0 comments.", "body_md": "Does any prompt or system exist which addresses this issue?\n\nI tend to write my code comments in a very idiosyncratic way, and LLMs either don't understand that (nor do I expect them to), or it isn't much worth explaining. I'm fine with normal LLM comments, but publishing to production means I often have to do a lot of manual clean up with comments when committing code, and that's tedious.\n\nIt would even be fine if LLMs all commented the same, but they don't. I actually like the way some LLMs comment, but others are horrendous. The inconsistency is what makes this a mess, and simply saying \"no comments whatsoever\" (though it works) is hardly an alternative. What I want is a clean, consistent format with strict guidelines on what, and importantly what *not*, to comment, that works for all LLMs.\n\nThe idea here being that I can go on my merry way coding with agents, and that going forward they'll always output perfectly understandable code which I'll never have to check again.\n\nIs there any progress here?\n\nComments URL: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49790384](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49790384)\n\nPoints: 1\n\n# Comments: 0", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ask-hn-formatting-guidelines-for-llm-comments", "canonical_source": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49790384", "published_at": "2026-09-21 17:27:36+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-09-21 17:54:15.521844+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["large-language-models", "ai-agents", "developer-tools"], "entities": ["Hacker News"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ask-hn-formatting-guidelines-for-llm-comments", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ask-hn-formatting-guidelines-for-llm-comments.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ask-hn-formatting-guidelines-for-llm-comments.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ask-hn-formatting-guidelines-for-llm-comments.jsonld"}}