alt Hacker NewsI think this is one of those things where a human in the loop is indispensable
An agentic refactoring pass does make sense cause one LLM reviewing work can spot things the ‘generator’ LLM missed while focused on the initial task output
But can the reviewer agent ever actually have in mind what this project actually is? And how the code all comes together to do the work involved? In other words what parts of the code are redundant or can be made more elegant
Asking coding agents to refactor your codebase is maybe like asking trauma surgeons to increase your exercise capacity. The agents are gonna need a really holistic POV to do this properly
I guess part of my point is that just splitting big files into multiple files is only refactoring in a superficial sense without having a theory of what code belongs together and what can be extracted into utility functions etc. Is splitting files actually like decomposing factors or is it like splitting a larger number into smaller numbers that still eventually get added together
A good example of what I mean is that agents often don’t ~actually~ understand the whole system anyway. They might implement a system to store and calculate something that is already being fetched via API. Humans often have a dual perspective — a holistic sense of the project and (when applying our mind to a task) a precise scalpel: ‘oh if we just look at this this JSON it has a key with this data already’
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I was able to largely refactor something that was going to take months in a week or so by being the narrating human in the loop.
It was helped by having refactoring experience and approaches to codebases by others, and in my case, being the original architect and being able to speak to the original and current intents, where needed.
This was using a less common, but capable and easy language for the LLM without a ton of dependancy brittleness to manage.. once the effort to remove javascript/python bias was in place, it became so powerful that once the lightbulb went on, it really got cruising.
The project was playing in the world of JSR-223 languages, where you could script in many popular languages, but it all got to run in the JVM, which was an environmental requirement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scripting_for_the_Java_Platfor...
Your take is outdated. Agents are excellent at refactoring now. If you told me what you wrote during an interview, that would be grounds to not continue.
It's very important that you are using coding agents with the latest frontier models and know exactly what it can't and can't do if you want to be hired in this market.
> Asking coding agents to refactor your codebase is maybe like asking trauma surgeons to increase your exercise capacity. The agents are gonna need a really holistic POV to do this properly
If you ask it to implement a specific kind of refactoring over a specific section of code it seems that current LLMs can do just fine. Even things as complex as "use `functools.partial` to implement the Command pattern here, rather than dataclasses".
> Is splitting files actually like decomposing factors or is it like splitting a larger number into smaller numbers that still eventually get added together
The file boundaries represent logical subsystem boundaries in the code, making it easier to reason about. The training data abundantly represents the idea of treating the contents of another file as opaque by default while other functionality in the same file can be used freely. I think it's reasonable to assume that there's something objective about the benefits that humans get from this, and it isn't just a consequence of how human cognition works.