SOURCE-LINKED INTELLIGENCE

Talking to Itself While Coding: What Makes Comments Help Code Generation?

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Sep 8, 2026 · UTC

Large Language Models (LLMs) often generate natural-language comments while writing code, and these comments become part of the context used to generate the code that follows. However, it remains unclear which properties of comments affect code-generation performance. We study this question through observational analyses and controlled interventions. On LiveCodeBench, neither comment frequency nor broad comment intent reliably predicts pass@1. We then prefill weaker recipient models with comment blocks written by stronger source models, allowing us to separate comment surface form from the sol

Read original source ↗ Open in workspace

recordType

paper

region

Global