Java formatters: can't live with them, can't live without them. New post on Foojay by Alex Abashev about the tricky balance between automated formatting and personal coding style.
foojay.io/today/my-lov...#Java#CodeFormatting#DevLife
There's also Prince of Spaces that is interesting and similar in intent and output. However these new formatters are pretty young. The challenge is having maintenance.
You'd think that the modern ones should optimize for grepability so coding agents can easily find their way around a code base. Maybe one should make one of those.
I think agent-first would look a lot different than something based on the current standard formats. No need to linebreak long lines, for example. Best if they grep as one unit.
I wouldn't go that way, otherwise what's even the point of having sources. Pushing to the extreme the tokenization embedding could work directly on binaries and LLM would work the same way ; I'd rather not.
I think formatter should do their job for humans, and agents can still use AST aware tooling
Agents can reason about sources much better. I tried to have Claude code in assembly to make sense of the "everything in Rust" argument and it does not normally go well. Claude approaches like a human, so the same benefits hold. Byte Buddy's source is organized grep friendly. Helped me a lot.