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Our style guide says "almost never auto," but most people auto everything. They can make the linter replace auto with the actual type if it's really that big a deal. Explicit type wouldn't have avoided this bug.

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Arguably an explicit type would have made the bug a little bit more obvious. You basically expect, by default, this kind of string manipulation functions to return a std::string. Obviously in this specific case you can return a view, and that makes it more performant; but it's kind of unexpected and using auto leaves the surprise a bit more hidden.

But sure, you can still make the error with expiclit types.

I agree, the string_view on the LHS might make you think more about the lifetime, but I'm pretty sure we all would've missed it.

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