I've tried telling it to "fix" comments with varying degrees of specificity and in my experience it just... fundamentally doesn't get it. Presumably using a different model for it would help.

My theory is that Claude's learned approach to comments is to treat them as a sort of persistent in-band thinking trace, or a "memory" tied to an in-code location, which is a little at odds with the way humans use comments (human comments are intended to be read and understood by other humans, whereas Claude comments are their own dialect).

I bet this is a result of iteratively training Claude on output from other successful Claude sessions. Presumably it's good for making benchmark scores go up.

I built my own skill to somewhat follow the Simplified Technical English guidelines (loosely adapted to my work context)

The problem I’ve been finding is that you can do this but within a few messages, the instructions in the skill will be ignored.

Absolutely infuriating if you’re using Claude in an environment where you can’t run hooks.