[Daishiman]

$18K a year is a fraction of the salary of a junior engineer.

Claude has allowed me to do refactors that would have taken weeks to instead take a couple of days. It has, objectively, increased the velocity of the engineering component of greenfield features by 40% in my org. You can put a number value on that and decide if it gives you favorable ROI.

[analognoise]

The point of a refactor is for you to think deeply about the code you are responsibility for, so you can make it better (faster, easier to work on, more tests, whatever).

You’ve gotten a result, but without the work that made you valuable, while deskilling yourself.

It’s a lose/lose situation for…I would say anyone employed as an engineer or programmer. I’m not taking responsible for AI output, the same way I won’t try to fix auto-generated code: because you just regenerate it.

The only person that wins here is the person who can pay you less because they don’t need you, they just need another “types computer guy”.

[Marsymars]

> The point of a refactor is for you to think deeply about the code you are responsibility for, so you can make it better (faster, easier to work on, more tests, whatever).

I'm pretty pessimistic on AI and don't have access to good agentic workflows, but refactors are exactly the thing where it seems to me like agents could be really strong - once I've refactored something architecturally, I might have hundreds of instances of a thing that needs to be updated in a predictable way, but is complicated enough that it's going to be faster for me to manually update hundreds of instances rather than writing a generalizable find/replace tool.

[strange_quark]

Sure they’re fine at that sort of rote find/replace job as long as it’s relatively straightforward. But it only really works if you do the hard parts yourself then tell the agent to go and do the rote part. Even then I’ve had it turn to slop more often than not as the agent has to start contorting the code into weird shapes to try and finish the job. It’ll never stop and be like “hey maybe this was a bad idea, let’s try something else”. And by the time you get to review it, you’ve spent 20 bucks on something that needs to be thrown away.

[Daishiman]

> The point of a refactor is for you to think deeply about the code you are responsibility for, so you can make it better (faster, easier to work on, more tests, whatever).

Absolutely false. Refactors (in my case) can be as simple as dropping old packages for newer packages with slightly different semantics. It can be moving legacy pages from jQuery to Vue.

> You’ve gotten a result, but without the work that made you valuable, while deskilling yourself.

I've 25 years coding, trust me, I don't lose anything by not finding out on my own that the semantics of a jQuery promise changed between major versions.

> The only person that wins here is the person who can pay you less because they don’t need you, they just need another “types computer guy”.

You have no idea of what you're talking about. There are entire classes of K8s networking issues that would have taken me a day to debug which Claude solved in minutes just because it can run 20 diagnostics commands in two minutes and deal with technical minutae that is time-consuming but ultimately irrelevant to my business goals.

[jg0r3]

$18k a year is near half of my salary as junior verging on senior developer in the conservation field. Not everyone works in FAANG.

[fg137]

In the old world, the refactor probably won't happen in the first place, but the effort would be put elsewhere. "Increased velocity of .. greenfield features" doesn't directly translate to additional revenue, and your number is very questionable in the first place.

Software engineers like to talk as if business and finance are as easy as pushing code out and refactoring. It's not and never has been.