People often ask why I contribute to open source projects or otherwise work on building automated tooling. They see me spending hours to automate a task or fix a bug that take seconds to do or avoid manually, in a way that the original XKCD comic says won’t pay off. The disconnect seems to be that the comic and those people only consider time it saves me, not time it saves the tens to thousands to millions of other people who will use the script or patch or whatever when I publish it. So, here’s a version of xkcd.com/1205 updated for making decisions that benefit a thousand people instead of just one.
Consider using an auto formatter. I just barf my code into the editor, press a magic key combo and it’s all formatted better than I could do by hand.
That’s the point. I automate it so I don’t have to do it manually multiple times a day. I don’t even press keys, it autoformats on periodic save.