Shorter code is almost always better.

Should you use a class? Should you use a Factory pattern or some other pattern? Should you reorganize your code? Whichever results in the least code is probably best.

A nice thing about code length is it’s objective. We can argue all day about which design pattern makes more sense, but we can agree on which of two implementations is shorter.

It takes a damn good abstraction to beat having shorter code.

The auto-formatting story is half baked I think. As far as I know most language have a formatter that goes only one way, which is an improvement over having no formatter at all.

What we’re missing is good tools to go from the standard format to a personalized format. For example, I was working on JavaScript recently and the team was using prettier with 2 space indentation. I found that somewhat hard to work with because of some minor vision issues, it was becoming a bit of an accessibility issue for me, but I was already viewed as a bit of a troublemaker at the company and pushing everyone to change their style wasn’t going to help me any.

I tried to find a tool that would reformat the code for me without altering the repository but couldn’t find an easy solution.

So we have formatters that go from “everyone’s personal style” to a standard style. But our tools for going the other direction, from standard style to “my personal style” are lacking. (Hoping to be proved wrong on this point.)