A lightweight comment convention for better human–AI collaboration in codebases (github.com)

A new lightweight comment convention, termed "AI Comments," aims to enhance collaboration between human developers and AI agents within codebases. This convention introduces a structured format for comments, utilizing a specific wrapper (/*[ ... ]*/) to distinguish AI Comments from regular comments, thus allowing both humans and AI tools to quickly identify important intent, constraints, and instructions. The integration of control prefixes, such as ~ for rules and ? for contextual information, aims to streamline code understanding, improve maintenance, and reduce communication overhead. The significance of AI Comments lies in their potential to speed up code reviews and refactoring processes by maintaining high-signal documentation directly alongside the code. By encouraging developers to adhere to concise rules and clear instructions, AI Comments can prevent code drift and facilitate a more efficient exchange of knowledge between human programmers and AI systems. Ultimately, while currently a draft convention, this approach is expected to pave the way for future tooling that will fully leverage these structured comments, shaping a new standard for human-AI interaction in software development.