It feels like I'm negotiating with a toddler. If I say nothing, it adds useless comments everywhere. If I tell it to not add comments, it deletes all of my comments. Tell it to put the comments back, and it still throws away half of my comments and rewrites the reset in a less precise way.
I think it is likely that the comments are more for the model than for the user. I would not be even slightly surprised if verbose coding versions outperformed light commenting versions.
On the other hand, I'm skeptical if that has any impact because these models have thinking tokens where they can put all those comments and attention shouldn't care about how close the tokens are as long as they're within the context window.
The excessive comments might help the model when it's called again to re edit the code in the future - wouldn't be surprised if it was optimizing for vibe coding and the redundant comments reinforce the function/intent of the line when it's being modified down the line
"# Added this function" "# Changed this to fix the issue"
No, I know, I was there! This is what commit messages for, not comments that are only relevant in one PR.