It's really a balancing act. Gotta have the right amount of comments. In general I prefer code that is written such that comments are not necessary, but in the

It's really a balancing act. Gotta have the right amount of comments. In general I prefer code that is written such that comments are not necessary, but in the context here the "clever" tricks should always be commented. And to that end, the code should be peer-reviewed and determined by other individuals whether it's confusing or not. While comments can certainly become stale, we're talking about portions of code that will most likely not change frequently. If there's a clever solution it better need to be clever otherwise it's just bad style.