Writing code these days is really different from before. In the past, you had to type it line by line. Now? AI spits out a big chunk of HTML in seconds. You can't say it's unusable—run it in the browser and the page actually shows up. But you also can't say it's ready to use directly—open the source code and it's a complete mess.
I recently took over a project where all the frontend pages were AI-generated. At first it seemed great—so efficient, several pages a day. But the day before launch, a testing colleague came over and told me a button wouldn't respond to taps on mobile. I opened the code and—wow—a div nested seven or eight levels deep, indentation all over the place, tag closures left entirely for the browser to guess. It took me forever to locate the problem: a tag wasn't closed, and when the browser auto-repaired it, it scrambled the entire structure after it.
After that experience, I learned my lesson. No matter how normal AI-generated code looks, it must go through an HTML formatting tool before going live.
Why does it have to be formatted? Let me give you a few solid reasons.
First, after formatting, the code structure is clear at a glance. AI has a bad habit when writing code—it likes to pile everything together, no line breaks where there should be, no indentation where there should be. Run it through a formatting tool and the parent-child relationships become crystal clear—which tag wraps which, you can see it instantly. When hunting for bugs, the efficiency difference can be several times over.
Second, it helps you discover hidden errors. Some tags aren't closed, some attributes are written wrong—when the code is messy, you simply can't spot them. Run the formatting tool and the structural problems are immediately exposed. It's like tidying a room—when things are piled up randomly you think everything's fine, but once you organize, you find there's an extra useless box here and a missing lid there.
Third, when working in a team, only formatted code is easy to review. Think about it—a colleague submits a bunch of AI-generated code with chaotic indentation and arbitrary line breaks. Do you look at it or not? Looking gives you a headache; not looking makes you uneasy. After unified formatting, everyone follows the same standard, and who changed what is clear at a glance.
Fourth, it's friendlier to the browser. Although browsers have strong error tolerance, that's them covering for you. When code structure is clear and tags are properly closed, the browser's rendering efficiency is also higher. Especially on mobile, where performance is already tight—don't add more chaos for the browser.
My current workflow is this: AI generates code, I copy it into the editor, run it through an HTML formatting tool, then visually scan the structure, and only after confirming everything's fine do I put it into the project. It doesn't take more than two extra minutes, but the debugging time saved is far more than two minutes.
Some people might think, formatting is just adding indentation and line breaks—how much difference can it make? Let me put it this way: when you write an article, you need paragraphs, right? Isn't it exhausting to read an article with no paragraph breaks? Code is the same. Formatting isn't about looking pretty—it's about leaving nowhere for problems to hide.
One more thing to remind everyone: AI-generated code sometimes carries strange attributes or redundant tags. After formatting, these redundancies become especially obvious. You can just delete them in passing, and the page load speed gets a little faster. Don't underestimate that little bit—small gains add up, and user experience is built up bit by bit like that.
So don't be lazy. AI helping you write code is a good thing, but the final checkpoint before launch—you have to guard it yourself. The HTML formatting tool looks unremarkable, but at critical moments it can really save you. At least for me now, I can't do without it—without running it through formatting once, I just don't feel confident.