Comment by skydhash
4 days ago
Code structure is simple. Semantics is where it get tough. So if you have a good understanding of the code (and even when you don't), the overview you get from one of those tools (and the added interactivity) is nice for confirming (understanding) the needed actions that needs to be done.
> cursor agent does it just fine in the background
That's for a very broad definition of fine. And you still need to review the diff and check the surrounding context of each chunk. I don't see the improvement in metrics like productivity and cognitive load. Especially if you need to do serveral rounds.
You mentioned grep-mode, which to my knowledge is just bringing up a buffer with all the matches for a regex and easily jumping to each point (I use rg.el myself). For the record, this is basically the same thing as VSCode's search tool.
Now, once you have that, to actually make edits, you have to record a macro to apply at each point or just manually do the edit yourself, no? I don't pretend LLMs are perfect, but I certainly think using one is a much better experience for this kind of refactoring than those two options.
Maybe it's my personal workflow, but I either have sweeping changes (variable names, removing dependencies) which are easily macroable, or very targeted one (extracting functions, decoupling stuff,..,). For both, this navigation is a superpower and coupled with the other tools of emacs/vim, edit is very fast. That rely on a very good mental model of the code, but any question can be answered quickly with the above tools.
For me, it's like having a moodboard with code listings.
Yes I've done this kind of refactoring for ages using emacs macros and grep. Language Server and tree-sitter in emacs has made this faster (when I can get all the dependencies setup correctly that is.) Variable name edits and function extraction is pretty much table stakes in most modern editors like IntelliJ, VSCode, Zed, etc. IIRC Eclipse had this capability 15-20 years ago.
I used to have more patience for doing it the grep/macro way in emacs. It used to feel a bit zen, like going through the code and changing all the call-sites to use my new refactor or something. But I've been coding for too long to feel this zen any longer, and my own expectations for output have gotten higher with tools like language-server and tree-sitter.
The kind of refactorings I turn to an LLM for are different, like creating interfaces/traits out of structs or joining two different modules together.