Is clean code about formatting and structuring the code, according to some standards (for example, PEP-8, or a custom standard defined by the project guidelines)? The short answer is no.

Clean code is something else that goes way beyond coding standards, formatting, linting tools, and other checks regarding the layout of the code. Clean code is about achieving quality software and building a system that is robust, maintainable, and avoiding technical debt. A piece of code or an entire software component could be 100% with PEP-8 (or any other guideline), and still not satisfy these requirements.

However, not paying attention to the structure of the code has some perils. For this reason, we will first analyze the problems with a bad code structure, how to address them, and then we will see how to configure and use tools for Python projects in order to automatically check and correct problems.

To sum this up, we can say that clean code has nothing to do with things like PEP-8 or coding styles. It goes way beyond that, and it means something more meaningful to the maintainability of the code and the quality of the software. However, as we will see, formatting the code correctly is important in order to work efficiently.