Prettier and Opinionated Code Formatting with James Long

Software Engineering Daily · Mar 19, 2026 · 50m

Developer tooling shapes how software gets written day to day, but the best tools often disappear into the background once they succeed. Formatting, linting, and build systems can either create friction and endless debate, or quietly remove entire classes of problems from a team’s workflow. Over the past decade, the JavaScript ecosystem has wrestled with both extremes as it scaled rapidly and accumulated complexity.

Prettier emerged as a response to the surprisingly human problem of engineers spending too much time debating code style instead of building software. It offers a deterministic…