Nuke Comments

Nuke Comments

Deletes every comment in the target file(s) or directory, unconditionally. There's no distinction here between a tutorial comment and a required SAFETY: note, a license header, or a public API doc comment — they're all comments, so they all go. This only exists because the user has explicitly chosen blind, no-review removal over a judgment-based cleanup — don't use it when the actual ask is "clean up bad comments" or "improve comment quality."

Before running this on a real codebase, say once, plainly, what it will also remove: license/copyright headers, SAFETY:/# Safety doc comments on unsafe code, and public API docs (rustdoc/Javadoc/godoc/docstrings). State it and proceed — the user has already decided this tradeoff is what they want; don't turn it into a confirmation gate or ask again.

How it works

A bundled Python state machine (scripts/strip_comments.py) tracks whether the parser is inside a string, a raw/triple-quoted string, a line comment, or a block comment (with nesting for Rust's /* /* */ */), so it only deletes actual comments and never touches // or # sitting inside a string literal or a URL in a string. It needs nothing beyond Python 3's standard library.

Supported by extension:

• Rust (.rs) — //, /* */ (nested), and r"..." / r#"..."# raw strings
• C-family (.c .h .cpp .hpp .cc .cxx .java .scala .kt .kts .js .jsx .mjs .cjs .ts .tsx .proto .go .cs .swift .php .dart .zig .jsonc) — //, /* */
• Hash-family (.py .pyw .sh .bash .zsh .rb .yaml .yml .toml .r .pl .pm, Dockerfile) — #
• Dash-family (.sql .lua .hs) — --, plus /* */ for SQL

Anything else (e.g. plain YAML edge cases, exotic languages) is skipped silently — the tool never guesses at a syntax it wasn't given.

Known limitation: cgo preambles

In Go files that import "C", the /* ... */ block immediately above that import isn't documentation — cgo compiles its contents as literal C, so #includes, #cgo directives, and any C declarations placed in there are real code wearing a Go comment as a syntax requirement. This tool can't distinguish that from an ordinary comment and will delete C code along with it, breaking the build (symptom: could not determine kind of name for C.foo). If a repo has .go files using cgo, check go build ./... afterward and be ready to manually restore anything load-bearing that lived inside a cgo preamble.

Scope

Resolve $ARGUMENTS to a target in this order — stop at the first match:

1. No argument → run git status --porcelain (staged and unstaged, tracked files). If there are uncommitted changes, target those changed files' paths directly. If there are none, say so and stop — don't fall back to stripping the whole repo, that must be requested explicitly (case 5).
2. A filesystem path that exists relative to the repo root (a file or directory) → target it directly, same as before.
3. A PR reference (#123, 123, PR 123, or a GitHub PR URL) → gh pr diff <number> --name-only for the file list; target those paths as they exist in the current working tree (gh pr checkout <number> first only if the files aren't present locally, and confirm with the user first since it switches branches).
4. A branch name that resolves via git show-ref --verify or appears in git branch --list/git branch -r → diff it against its merge base with the repo's default branch (git merge-base <branch> origin/HEAD) and target the files that diff touches.
5. An explicit whole-repo request ("full repo", "whole repo", "repo", "everything", "all") → target the repo root, same as passing it as a directory.
6. Anything that matches none of the above (typo'd path, unknown branch, PR number that doesn't exist) → say so and ask, rather than guessing or silently widening scope.

Running it

python3 ~/.claude/skills/nuke-comments/scripts/strip_comments.py -i <path> [<path> ...]

• <path> can be a single file, a directory (recursed automatically), or several of either — pass one argument per file/directory the scope resolution above landed on (e.g. every changed file for the no-argument or PR/branch cases, or the repo root for the whole-repo case).
• -i / --in-place writes the stripped result back to each file. Without it, the tool writes to stdout instead — useful for a quick look, but for the "just remove them" workflow this skill exists for, use -i.
• .git, target, node_modules, .build, build, dist, .idea, .vscode, .venv, venv, __pycache__, and any other dot-directory are skipped automatically.

Reporting back

The script prints one Stripped: <path> line per file it actually modified, plus Warning:/Error: lines for anything it couldn't read. After running, just relay that file list back to the user — that's the whole report. Don't open the diff, don't walk through what got removed, don't add anything back. That's the point of this skill over the judgment-based cleanup workflow.