Refactoring using LLMs
It‘s really quite amazing the sort of refactoring of your code you can get done when working with LLMs. They make it possible to see much much further into the future, and you can get a much better idea of whether something is possible or not, but also if you can't quite see the through line, but you know it‘s there, you can head off in the general direction, and work things out as you go.
This happened several times to me this week, I had a really good sense that it was possible, but it was really lot of very abstract changes, and I couldn't quite get a handle on it. Instead of fighting, I just said, what are the top 3 things we could do to the code base to put us in a position that would make the particular refactor possible. The LLM had a good sense of where we were heading as we'd been discussing it for a while, and so we charted a course and started on the top 3 things.
By the time we finished the top 3 things, it had cleared enough of the brambles and tangles that it was much much more obvious how the refactor could be done.
But don‘t fall into the perfection trap, you have to be pragmatic, there are times, where getting to stable ground is more important that having everything perfect. #