[Neywiny]

Well another problem is that there was a developer also working on those functions at the same time. So just like the recent post on a 25 million LoC reformat done in a weekend, it seemed better to do it in one fell swoop. If it's good enough at 25 million, I'm sure it's good enough at a few thousand

[nightpool]

Autoformatters are deterministic tools that are tested regularly, with extensive test suites and went through a very long process of production usage and review before the reformat:

    > We also built a tool to diff ripper trees across formatted files, accounting for things like rubyfmt converting single quotes to double quotes. Combined with our extensive test suite, we built confidence slowly and deliberately.

If an autoformatter is working right, it's only changing whitespace—not the actual code executed. Changing between two different implementations of the same function is very different from changing whitespace around.

They also didn't do the entire thing in one weekend—that was just the article title clickbait. they did it file by file, incrementally, over the course of months:

    > Rolling out a novel autoformatter to 25 million lines of code has two big risks: merge conflicts and correctness. A bug affecting just 0.01% of lines would still touch tens of thousands of files. To manage both, we built in a per-file opt-in so rubyfmt would only format files that explicitly asked for it. Following the Developer Productivity org’s typical pattern, we started with systems we owned and could observe closely, then expanded coverage gradually as our confidence grew.

^ See how they talk about the incremental changes it took? This is what mature refactors look like. And they were only changing whitespace!