auto: useful, annoying or bad practice?

[Nerve]

On Monday, 30 April 2018 at 21:11:07 UTC, Gerald wrote:
> So I'm curious, what's the consensus on auto?

Speaking for myself:

1) I find auto to be useful when instantiating objects locally; 
eliminates redundancy, noise, and line size.

2) I avoid auto functions and despise them in API documentation. 
It’s difficult to work with the return type of a function when 
the definition is auto and the author didn’t follow up by 
describing exactly what was returned.

3) I avoid auto for primitive types because their type names are 
short, and declaring them C- and Ada-style at the beginning of a 
local block helps massively clarify what a function is about to 
do.

So basically only for object instantiations. I’ve yet to find a 
great use for it outside of that.