[sysmax]

It's just faster and less distracting. What is a total game-changer for me, is small refactoring. Let's say, you have a method that takes a boolean argument. At some point you realize you need a third value. You could replace it with an enum, but updating a handful of call sites is boring and terribly distracting.

With LLMs I can literally type "unsavedOnly => enum Scope{Unsaved, Saved, RecentlySaved (ignore for now)}" and that's it. It will replace the "bool unsavedOnly" argument with "scope Scope", update the check inside the method, and update the callers. If had to do it by hand each time, I would have lazied out and added another bool argument, or some other kind of a sloppy fix, snowballing the technical debt. But if LLMs can do all the legwork, you don't need sloppy fixes anymore. Keeping the code nice and clean doesn't mean a huge distraction and doesn't kick you out of the zone.

[hxbxbsbsn]

This is a standard use case which is better served by a deterministic refactoring tool

[sysmax]

Looked into it a lot. There are deterministic refactoring tools for things like convert for into foreach, or create constructor based on list of fields, but they still don't cover a lot of use cases.

I tried using a refactoring tool for reordering function arguments. The problem is, clicking through various GUI to get your point across is again too distracting. And there are still too many details. You can't say something like "new argument should be zero for callers that ignore the return value". It's not deterministic, and each case is slightly different from others. But LLMs handle this surprisingly well, and the mistakes they make are easy to spot.

What I'm really hoping to do some day is a "formal mode" where the LLM would write a mini-program to mutate the abstract syntax tree based on a textual refactoring request, thus guaranteeing determinism. But that's a whole new dimension of work, and there are numerous easier use cases to tackle before that.

[rerdavies]

This is a standard use case which, as far as I know, is not served by a deterministic refactoring tool.