Tabs or spaces for indentation?
The holy war, settled by committee.
Bottom line: 80% of the top AI models say “Spaces” to “Tabs or spaces for indentation?” — 4 of 5 (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, and DeepSeek) agree.
How the 5 models split
ChatGPT · Gemini · Grok · DeepSeek
Claude
The disagreement
Claude makes the principled accessibility case for tabs (configurable width), but the other four prioritize ecosystem consistency and formatter defaults.
Every model's answer
- ChatGPTSpaces
Spaces render identically everywhere and dominate language style guides (PEP 8, Prettier defaults). Consistency wins.
- ClaudeTabsOutlier
Tabs are semantic indentation and let each developer set their own width — strictly better for accessibility.
- GeminiSpaces
Most major style guides and auto-formatters standardize on spaces; following the ecosystem default reduces friction.
- GrokSpaces
Spaces avoid the mixed-indentation bugs that plague shared codebases. Just run a formatter and move on.
- DeepSeekSpaces
Predictable alignment across editors and diffs makes spaces the safer team default.
How we got this
We asked ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, and DeepSeek the same question and recorded each model's answer and reasoning. The consensus is the option the most models chose; outliers and stale answers are flagged, not averaged away. Last refreshed June 23, 2026.