I used to have strong opinions about nearly every character in a source file. Indentation, line breaks, capitalization, where a clause belonged, how much space made something readable. The language did not matter much. I did it with ARexx, Perl, SQL, PowerShell, and everything between them. (I never really got into Python; now I’m wondering if the formatting had anything to do with it…)

The exact rules changed over the years, but there were always rules. Usually mine.

Some of those choices were not especially popular even if they weren’t technically wrong. They were just specific enough that I could open an unfamiliar file and know within a few seconds whether I had written it. That was useful when several people had been through the same stored procedure or script. My code looked like my code, for better or worse.

I was a little proud of that. Probably more than a little.

Style was part readability and part control. If the formatting was consistent, I could scan a long SQL procedure or PowerShell script without thinking much about the punctuation. When somebody reformatted a section differently, it interrupted that. I’d notice the style change before I noticed what the code did, which is not a particularly helpful order when you’re reviewing a production fix at two in the morning.

At some point over the past two years I just stopped fighting about it. I started using automatic formatting wherever I could, then gradually let the formatter have the final say even when I would have arranged something differently by hand.

I can’t point to the commit where that happened. I’d been letting the formatter do it for a while before I really noticed.

Now Prettier handles most of the TypeScript, JSON, Markdown, and configuration files I touch. The quality gates reject anything that disagrees. An agent can add a file, I can change another part of it, and the result comes out in the same house style without either of us spending time negotiating whitespace. That matters a lot more with a template and a fleet of applications than it did when I was the only person editing one script.

There are still formatter decisions I do not like. Prettier deliberately limits its options, so some of those decisions are going to keep annoying me. And there are no formatters (besides my own) that can output SQL I approve of. Sometimes my hand still wants to put a layout back the way I had it. Most of the time I leave it alone; the next formatting pass would undo it anyway.

I did lose the easy fingerprint. I can’t identify my code from its braces, case, or indentation anymore. The names and the mildly excessive number of checks around anything destructive might still give me away.

Still, every once in a while I miss opening a file and recognizing myself before I read a word.