The "Comment" Fallacy: Why Self-Documenting Code is Still the Goal

In the bible of software engineering, Clean Code, comments are often characterized as failures to write expressive code. Unfortunately, the rise of Generative AI has tempted many developers into the lazy habit of asking LLMs to just "add comments" to messy code blocks. This is a step backward. Instead of using AI to generate apologies for bad code, we should use it as a merciless refactoring partner to suggest better naming and function extraction, making comments obsolete.