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

Comments are very useful in the code development workflow. With increased access to and capability of tools, novice coders have been creating a significant amount of codebases. However, due to lack of standardization, their comments are often ineffective and can increase the time taken for subsequent maintenance. This study investigates the utility of using Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate more effective comments. The study focuses on the feasibility of utilizing design documents as a context for LLMs to generate more useful comments. Our results show that the usefulness of comments increases when using such contextual information.