Comment by zahlman

> Asking coding agents to refactor your codebase is maybe like asking trauma surgeons to increase your exercise capacity. The agents are gonna need a really holistic POV to do this properly

If you ask it to implement a specific kind of refactoring over a specific section of code it seems that current LLMs can do just fine. Even things as complex as "use `functools.partial` to implement the Command pattern here, rather than dataclasses".

> Is splitting files actually like decomposing factors or is it like splitting a larger number into smaller numbers that still eventually get added together

The file boundaries represent logical subsystem boundaries in the code, making it easier to reason about. The training data abundantly represents the idea of treating the contents of another file as opaque by default while other functionality in the same file can be used freely. I think it's reasonable to assume that there's something objective about the benefits that humans get from this, and it isn't just a consequence of how human cognition works.