Formatting and Improving Your Code

Summary

This chapter shows how to use AI coding assistants to help clean up our code. Using a code formatter extension, we can have VS Code to format our code as we work. Many good automated code formatters are available. One popular code formatter is Prettier. Prettier calls itself an opinionated code formatter, which means we will have little control over how Prettier formats our code but it will do it consistently. The chapter teaches how AI tools can help to identify potential issues in our programs that can benefit from refactoring and then how to use AI to help fix those issues. It discusses the detection of code smells with Copilot. It is common for AI‐generated code to contain bad coding practices and code smells. One way to use AI to check for code smells is to use the GitHub Copilot Chat feature.