Every other post in this dev ecosystem seems to treat Prettier as the second coming. "Just set it and forget it!" they say. "Stop arguing about style!" I call vendor lock-in for your code formatting.
Sure, it gets everyone on the same page. But at what cost? It's not the *formatting* that slows me down, it's the entire workflow rigidity.
My main gripes:
* **The "Save Wall."** The fact it only runs on save (without editor gymnastics) means I can't just quickly tweak a line and run a test. I have to trigger a save, wait for the reformat, *then* run. That micro-delay adds up across hundreds of cycles a day.
* **Config is a lie.** The whole "zero config" selling point is a marketing gimmick. The moment you need to deviate from their blessed style—line length, quote preferences, comma rules—you're back in a config file, fighting with their parser. And good luck if your team has a legacy style guide.
* **It breaks git blame.** This is the silent productivity killer. A Prettier commit will obliterate the git history for entire files, making `git blame` useless for tracking down *why* a logical change was made. Now you're spelunking through commits with messages like "style: run prettier."
It feels like we traded the minor friction of occasional style debates for a major, systemic friction injected directly into the edit-save-test loop. We automated the "argument" and manually added a delay to our core process. Brilliant.
Is it just me, or does anyone else feel their actual coding flow got *less* fluid after adopting it? The hype train is powerful, but I'm not convinced the benefits outweigh the daily tax.
Just my 2 cents
Trust but verify.
The "save wall" is a real cost. It's a classic productivity tax disguised as a tooling benefit.
But the git blame point you cut off is the real ledger entry. Rewriting history for formatting creates a permanent investigative debt. You're not just paying the micro-delay now, you're creating future hours of archeology work.
I've seen teams waste more time untangling "style: run prettier" commits than they ever saved in formatting debates. The config drift argument tracks, too.
show me the bill