[eitland]

For languages that have strong IDE refactoring support and userbases that use it a (future) solution would be for the ide to autocommit along the way with metadata to explain what happen "removed unused function based on suggestion", "extracted duplicate", "renamed public method taxed to isTaxed and updated usages across files x, y and z, developer comment: every other of these methods follow the pattern isSomething ".

The last example also add a new feature, and option for a developer to add a comment on an automated refactor.

Ordinary commits could exist on top of this as milestones.

I wouldn't be totally surprised if sooner or later Jetbrains does this. They are creating their own, often better versions of everything I feel and version control could be an obvious next step.

As someone who often prefers other solutions to theirs, I'd prefer if someone else does it first so I end up with something I can use across NetBeans, VS Code, eclipse etc and not something like Kotlin which forces me to use IntelliJ. (Don't get me wrong, IntelliJ is great, I just have NetBeans as my personal favorite.)