[theptip]

Sure. You seem to think that LLMs will be unable to identify abstraction opportunities if the code is not identical; that’s not obvious to me. Indeed there are some good (but not certain) reasons to think LLMs will be better at broad-not-deep stuff like “load codebase into context window and spot conceptual repetition”. Though I think the creative insight of figuring out what kind of abstraction is needed may be the spark that remains human for a while.

Also, maybe recognizing the repetition remains the human's job, but refactoring is exponentially easier and so again we get better code as a result.

Seems to me to be pretty early to be making confident predictions about how this is all going to pan out.