[geofft]

Comments straddle this weird line between code and human process. They're in the source code files themselves, and there is an appeal to trying to evaluate a project by looking at the source code alone and trying to gauge abstract technical merit. But I think the real truth here is that comments are a tool in the service of a development process, which includes things like having code reviews, having code reviewers be sufficiently motivated (intrinsically or extrinsically) to care in useful ways and neither nitpicking nor rubber-stamping, having motivated people on the project in the first place, having shared values about what code you're going to write and what code you're not, having tests and doing the operational work to keep tests running, retaining people on the team, etc.