I'm pretty sure that this is both

1. an artifact of agent tools only doing generic greps based on keyword searches, limiting the scope to a few lines 2. RLHF from Anthropic and OpenAI that bake in catastrophic edit avoidance

I used to have a CLAUDE.md rule that forbid inline comments and only allowed public API doc comments. That used to work perfectly back in 2025 era models. Now these models refuse to honor it and write worse comment slop.

This has become the "voice" of Opus 4.8 and I just roll my eyes when someone puts up a PR that includes more comments than code changes telling a story about all the random things it found during exploration.

These comments do cost us real dollars to endure, both from the model generation cost and the human cost of having to read them. I was hopeful Fable would have been better, but aye, it's worse and writes the same comment slop in multiple places now.