Right. The equivalent in handwritten code would be formatting your code by hand. That used to be the normal way to do it!

For handwritten code, the evolution of best practices has tended to be:

- just make your code look neat and tidy;

- follow the style and conventions of existing code;

- follow a strict formatting style guide;

- format automatically using a tool.

I don’t see why it should be any different with LLMs. Why format with an LLM each time, when you can use the LLM once to write the formatter?

Maybe there’s a point at which neural nets replace conventional programming languages for low-level tasks. But I’m skeptical that natural language models will replace programming languages for low-level tasks any time soon.