I agree entirely. As far as code that handles bizarre edge-cases, I tried to cover that in "Comments that explain why". Perhaps I missed the mark a little, but

I agree entirely. As far as code that handles bizarre edge-cases, I tried to cover that in "Comments that explain why". Perhaps I missed the mark a little, but I think I was intending to agree with the point you made. "Often, it’s because I’ve profiled it and found it to be significantly faster, or because it catches an edge-case that a more intuitive method of doing the same thing might not .. Comments like this get to stay." To your point about "business needs this by Monday, 3 weeks ago". Under those circumstances, I write comments to explain my rushed code all the time. In my personal case though, I'd consider this to be "Comments as an excuse not to refactor". It might be a good excuse (maybe the business need trumps readability in the short-term), but I know it's still an excuse and not something I should be doing all the time. I'm trying to get better at going back and refactoring those things later.