Formatting a 25M-line codebase overnight

Stripe says it pulled off a weekend stunt that sounds almost made up: two engineers used a new tool to reformat 25 million lines of Ruby code overnight, tackling what the company calls the biggest Ruby codebase on Earth. The tool, rubyfmt, was born from years of frustration over endless arguments about how code should look. In plain English: instead of employees bickering over commas, spacing, and layout, the software just decides for everyone. Some readers were impressed by the ambition. Others saw one giant red flag waving over the internet.

The loudest reaction? Pure panic. One commenter stared at the idea of a major payments company running money-moving systems in Ruby and fired off a one-word horror review: "Terrifying." Another couldn’t get past the sheer size of the project, calling 25 million lines of code "completely unfathomable" and basically begging for a documentary. And then came the classic internet side quest: while Stripe was talking about a giant engineering feat, one reader was busy rage-posting about the article’s floating spiral graphic, saying they spent more time deleting it than reading. Peak comments section energy.

There was humor, too. A nostalgic commenter told a story about building an old-school formatting tool called makenice just to clean up a coworker’s ugly code, only for that coworker to melt down spectacularly. That memory became the unofficial meme of the thread: programmers would rather rewrite civilization than agree on formatting. So yes, Stripe may have cleaned up a colossal codebase overnight — but the real spectacle was watching the crowd split between awe, dread, and pure reader-interface fury.