Leveraging Design-Aware Context in Large Language Models for Code Comment Generation

TL;DR

This paper explores using design documents as context for large language models to generate more effective code comments, aiming to improve code maintainability especially for novice programmers.

Contribution

It investigates the feasibility of leveraging design-aware context in LLMs to enhance code comment generation, a novel approach in this domain.

Findings

Design documents can serve as valuable context for comment generation.

Using design-aware context improves comment relevance and usefulness.

The approach aids novice coders in understanding and maintaining code.

Abstract

Comments are very useful to the flow of code development. With the increasing commonality of code, novice coders have been creating a significant amount of codebases. Due to lack of commenting standards, their comments are often useless, and increase the time taken to further maintain codes. This study intends to find the usefulness of large language models (LLMs) in these cases to generate potentially better comments. This study focuses on the feasibility of design documents as a context for the LLMs to generate more useful comments, as design documents are often used by maintainers to understand code when comments do not suffice.