Formatters

Formatters remove style debates from human review so reviewers focus on behavior, naming, architecture, and tests. Prettier, Biome, or language-native formatters should run on save and in pre-commit or CI. Consistent formatting also improves diffs and blame archaeology when debugging regressions.

On interviews: describe your formatting pipeline and how you avoid formatting-only PR noise. Mention editor integration and CI enforcement.

Common pitfalls: partial adoption so every PR mixes logic and whitespace; conflicting formatter and linter rules; manual formatting in generated files.

The trade-off is flexibility versus complexity—know when the simpler path is enough.

Checklist:

• One canonical formatter config for the repo.
• Format on commit or in CI before merge.
• Exclude generated artifacts explicitly.
• Keep formatter version pinned for reproducibility.