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AgentCompany/builtin-skills/software-engineer/clean-code/references/fmt-horizontal-alignment.md
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ZacharyZhang-NY e74dafcd36 Silence render-disposed spam, unbreak bundled skills, drop board wake
Three independently ugly bugs that all fed the same log flood:

* Electron's `WebFrameMain.send` writes every "Render frame was disposed"
  to stderr via `console.error`. When the worker fans a second
  agent-event past a reloading renderer, we produced thousands of
  identical lines and stalled the main loop on stderr I/O. Added a
  `mainFrame.detached` guard so the send is short-circuited before
  Electron's own catch block fires, and installed a targeted filter in
  `suppress-warnings.ts` (now actually imported from the entry point)
  so the specific `console.error("Error sending from webFrameMain:"…)`
  noise never reaches the terminal. Any other payload still surfaces.

* `dispatchAgentMessage` accepted the human-reader sentinel as a wake
  target when an agent replied to `__board__` — `wakeAgentIfPossible`
  then called `db.getAgent("__board__")`, threw, and the dispatcher
  kept repeating on every send. Strip `HUMAN_SENDER_ID` at
  `resolveMessageWakeTargets`, and keep a defense-in-depth guard in the
  heartbeat so a stray caller (future automation fan-out) cannot
  reintroduce the crash.

* Pi's skills loader rejects any SKILL.md whose frontmatter `name`
  diverges from its parent directory. The four bundled `my-writing-style`
  copies declared `name: writing-style-skill`, so every install emitted
  a warning and dropped the skill. They also lived as orphan gitlinks
  (mode 160000 without .gitmodules), and the global `*.md` gitignore
  hid every other SKILL.md from version control. Fixed the frontmatter
  to match the dir, converted the dangling submodules to plain trees,
  and allowlisted `builtin-skills/**/*.md` so a fresh clone carries the
  catalogue instead of silently losing it.
2026-04-20 08:13:48 -04:00

1.7 KiB

title, impact, impactDescription, tags
title impact impactDescription tags
Avoid Horizontal Alignment MEDIUM prevents alignment maintenance burden fmt, horizontal, alignment, whitespace

Avoid Horizontal Alignment

Horizontal alignment of variable declarations or assignments looks nice but creates maintenance problems. When one line changes length, all aligned lines need reformatting.

Incorrect (horizontal alignment):

private   Socket          socket;
private   InputStream     input;
private   OutputStream    output;
private   Request         request;
private   Response        response;
private   FitNesseContext context;
private   long            requestParsingTimeLimit;
private   long            requestProgress;

public void setResponse(Response       response)  { this.response  = response;  }
public void setSocket(Socket           socket)    { this.socket    = socket;    }
public void setContext(FitNesseContext context)   { this.context   = context;   }

Correct (natural formatting):

private Socket socket;
private InputStream input;
private OutputStream output;
private Request request;
private Response response;
private FitNesseContext context;
private long requestParsingTimeLimit;
private long requestProgress;

public void setResponse(Response response) {
    this.response = response;
}

public void setSocket(Socket socket) {
    this.socket = socket;
}

public void setContext(FitNesseContext context) {
    this.context = context;
}

Why avoid alignment?

  • Adding a longer variable name requires reformatting all lines
  • Eyes are drawn to the wrong thing (the alignment, not the names)
  • Most formatters don't preserve it anyway

Reference: Clean Code, Chapter 5: Formatting