Code style debates often get stuck on surface-level details like formatting, line length, or brace placement. While consistency matters, those discussions usually miss the deeper point. Code style exists to reduce cognitive load.
When an engineer reads code, they’re constantly answering questions in their head. What is this doing? Why is it here? What happens if I change it? Every unnecessary abstraction, unclear name, or overloaded function adds friction to that mental process. Over time, that friction turns into hesitation, bugs, and fear of change.
Good code style makes intent obvious. Variables describe what they represent, not how they’re implemented. Functions do one thing and do it clearly. Control flow reads top to bottom without surprises. None of this is about elegance for its own sake, it’s about making the system easier to reason about under pressure.
The true test of code style isn’t how it looks when freshly written. It’s how it feels when someone unfamiliar with the code has to debug it during an outage or modify it months later. If they can understand it quickly and act with confidence, the style did its job.
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