Cairn Comments: Hide AI Comments

Stash the slop, keep the context. Keep AI-written comments out of your code without deleting them, and see them again whenever you want.

Cairn Comments's git filter moves each AI comment into a tracked markdown file, with a record of the code it belongs to, and leaves no trace of it in the committed code. This extension draws the comments back over your plain code.

Overlay off: the editor shows the plain code.

Overlay on: each comment shows above the line it describes, and trailing ones at the end of their line.

• Overlay. Toggle with the AI comments status bar item, Cairn Comments: Toggle AI Comment Overlay, or Ctrl+Alt+`` (Cmd+Alt+`` on macOS). Off, the editor shows the plain code. On, each comment shows as a CodeLens above the line it describes, and a trailing one at the end of its line; cairn.ownLineStyle picks an expanded comment thread or an end-of-line label instead. Comments follow your edits as you type and travel with a function you copy and paste.
• Comment threads. Click a comment to open it as a thread: the full text, who wrote it, and buttons to edit it in place, confirm it, promote it to an ordinary comment, or delete it. Ctrl+Z undoes each of them.
• Stale comments. A comment whose function changed after it was written is marked [stale?] in the warning color. Its thread offers Confirm, and the Possibly Stale view in the AI Comments sidebar lists every flagged comment in the repository. The Orphaned view lists comments whose code is gone.
• Review. The Review view in the AI Comments sidebar scans the repository for comments that read as AI-written. Each row's buttons mark it as an AI comment (stash it), keep it as an ordinary comment (stop flagging it), or skip it until the next scan. Apply Review Decisions applies them in one pass, and the other two title buttons also decide every comment you left undecided. Undecided ones stay listed.
• Promote and demote. A code action moves an ordinary comment into the sidecar, and a comment's thread (or a code action in an agent worktree, where comments show inline) turns it back into an ordinary one.

Requirements

Git and Node 22 or later. The extension carries the cairn CLI; nothing else to install.

Tested on Windows and Linux (WSL Ubuntu included). macOS support is experimental: the test suite passed there in CI, but nobody has used it by hand yet. Please report what you find.

Open the repository and the AI Comments view in the Activity Bar. In a repository that is not set up yet, it offers Set Up Cairn Comments in This Repository, lists every change it will make, and makes them when you confirm. Commit the .gitattributes it writes; everyone who clones the repository sets it up once.

The overlay works on any checkout with sidecars. Agent setup, worktrees, and the CLI reference are in the project README.

Languages: Python, TypeScript, TSX, JavaScript, C#, Java, and Kotlin.

Settings

• cairn.overlayColor: CSS color for end-of-line comment labels. Empty uses the theme's CodeLens color.
• cairn.ownLineStyle: codelens (the default), thread, or eol, for comments on a line of their own.