This has been really a great problem for me to decide on when should i clean my code. And i even go the extent of thinking if the project/product should still have a clean code. We, the developers, add all sorts of comments into the code while implementation. Now, the comments become too valuable to get rid of. And i even think of adding a one liner for each statement. I am a lazy programmer and sometimes tend to forget what a particular piece of code does(written by me, ofcourse). However, i am too scared to remove my comments. Paradoxical, yet true. What level of commenting is needed after all? Should the comments be terse enough for only my understanding? or should i double up the comments relative to the KLOC? And if i have added something for my reference, exclusively, should it be really there in the final product?  What really made me think was cleaning the code for a demo ready product and be prepared to fix bugs that will crop up during the demo. So where do my valuable comments go? The commented echo/print/return/die statements that i had added before code cleaning are gone only to find them get added later during bug fixing. Sigh! How do you guys clean the mess?