comments-audit

name	comments:audit
description	Audit code comments for AI slop: restatement, narration/decision-log, self-praise, docstring-scope, and section-divider banners. Audits a diff (the comments a change introduced) or a whole repo, ranks by intrinsic complexity, fans out judging agents, and applies the trims to a fresh branch. Use when reviewing a branch or merge request, or sweeping a slop-heavy codebase.
argument-hint	[--all] [--base <ref>] [--mr <iid>] [--path <glob>] [--sort <key>] [--limit <n>] [--report] [--fix]
disable-model-invocation	true
allowed-tools	["Bash","Read","Workflow"]

Comments Audit

Find low-value comments and act on them. A deterministic Shiki pass extracts comments over TextMate grammars, the scope selects which to judge, a fan-out of Claude Code agents judges each against the owner's comment model, and a deterministic applier writes the changes to a branch. The judge returns one of three actions per comment: keep (it earns its place), trim (it carries no fact, delete or shorten it), or rewrite (it carries a real fact under AI voice, strip the voice and keep the fact). A comment earns its place when it adds information not readily available in the adjacent code. See judge/prompt.md for the full model and carve-outs.

The pipeline is three steps: preflight (extract, rank, build the job), the Workflow tool (judge), and apply (write the trims or report them).

Scope and Flags

Two scopes run the same pipeline. The flags select scope and narrow it:

• Default, --base <ref>, --mr <iid>: diff scope. Judges the comments a change introduced. Default is the working tree (staged plus unstaged). --base main is the merge-base with a ref. --mr <iid> is a GitLab merge request over glab.
• --all: repo scope. Judges every tracked code file's comments.
• --path <glob>: narrow either scope to matching paths. Repeatable. Prefer it on a first --all run on a large repo to cap the agent count.
• --sort lines|chars|score (default score): rank by intrinsic comment complexity so the longest, densest comments judge first.
• --limit <n>: keep only the top N ranked comments.

Both scopes exempt machine-meaningful comments deterministically: lint and compiler directives (eslint-disable, noqa, go:generate), shebang lines, and license headers never reach the judge.

• --fix: ask the judge for a concrete suggestion per finding.
• --report: at apply time, print findings instead of writing a branch.

Preflight

Run from the repository you are auditing (the script resolves the git root itself, so stay in the target repo rather than cd-ing into the plugin):

bun <plugin-dir>/skills/audit/scripts/audit.ts preflight $ARGUMENTS

This extracts and ranks the comments, builds the judging job on disk, and prints a human summary (N comments / M files / ~K agents / ~T tokens) followed by a machine block:

<preflight>
{"scriptPath": "...", "argsPath": "...", "jobDir": "...", "count": N, "shardCount": K}
</preflight>

Read the <preflight> block. Present the count, file count, and rough token estimate to the user. Wait for the user to confirm before fanning out. Nothing runs until they do. A 5,000-comment repo is roughly 250 agents; --path and --limit cap that.

--all requires a clean working tree, because it reads the working tree but applies from HEAD. Commit or stash first if preflight reports a dirty tree.

Judge

On confirmation, read argsPath (it is JSON) and call the Workflow tool with the scriptPath from the preflight block and args set to the parsed contents of argsPath:

Workflow({ scriptPath: <scriptPath>, args: <parsed job-args.json> })

Each agent reads one shard, judges its comments, and writes verdicts to disk. The workflow logs a small summary (shard count and how many were flagged). The bulk verdicts stay on disk, off the conversation, for apply to read.

Apply

bun <plugin-dir>/skills/audit/scripts/audit.ts apply --job <jobDir> [--report] [--fix]

Default apply re-extracts the judged files and matches verdicts to comments by id at their current position, applies the trims and rewrites, and commits to a fresh comments/audit-<hash> branch off HEAD. The commit is built with git plumbing, so the working tree is never modified and the current branch stays checked out. A rewrite replaces the comment span in place with the de-voiced text, so the diff shows the cleaned comment. A comment that moved or changed since preflight gets a new id, matches no verdict, and is skipped. Review the result with git diff HEAD..comments/audit-<hash>. Apply requires a clean working tree.

--report prints the findings grouped by file (path:line action category confidence rationale, with an old → new preview for each rewrite) and writes nothing. Use it to review before applying, or on a dirty tree. Comments the applier cannot change safely (a comment interleaved with code, a trim that would break a block delimiter) are left in place and listed for manual handling.