> I find the comments Copilot proposes is better than average comment quality for the code base I routinely work on

Maybe the average is just so bad? The completions I get for comments are document what the code is doing, which is not something that I ever put into comments. It's always:

a) A highlevel (prefixed to the function/block/scope definition) list of steps, input expectations and output expectations for the forthcoming function/block/scope

Or

b) A note explaining why the code does what it does.

A comment repeating the code but in English is useless.

The best comments are the type of:

  Whatever bad thing you think of this part is probably true, but I can’t do better.

And

  Beware, weird optimization ahead.

And

  Editing this code requires arcane knowledge.

It's not that my comments are infallible, but if I write something wrong/silly it'll be caught during code review. similarly if there's a comment missing before some arcane nonsense nobody will remember in 3 years, then i'd expect a PR reviewer to tell the dev to add one.

Copilot just likes to puke very useless comments whenever I type "//", especially in autocomplete mode (I don't really use the chat mode).