> This could be mitigated with the name of foo() being more descriptive.

welcome back Hungarian notation

lpwszThanks.

In seriousness, no, that's not what I'm suggesting, and I find it an unusual thing to read from my comment. I'm saying a descriptive name for foo() can give you a hint about what the type is, even if it doesn't literally and directly tell you what the type is.

auto conn = createConnection();

What does this have to do with hungarian notation?

You’re thinking of it wrong.

This works better:

auto uasStudents = getClassList()

In this case, “uas” prefix standing for an unsafe array of strings.

Then say you validate the list

auto sasStudents = validate(uasStudents)

(Now it’s a safe array of students!)

I feel like I’m missing a joke.

Alone this looks like a reasonable use of auto. In a real codebase, there may be two (or twenty) different connection-like things, multiple of which may be reasonably to call in this context.

The "Hungarian notation" comment is correct - it's not strictly Hungarian notation, but annotating function (or variable) names when the language has a type system representing this same information is the same idea with the same problems as Hungarian notation.