alt Hacker NewsOpus is quite good at refactoring. Also, we can finally have all the helper functions/beautiful libraries/tests that we always wanted to have. There is no excuse anymore to approximate a parser with regular expressions. Or to not implement the adapter class which makes an ugly unchangeable interface beautiful.
I believe the right use of AI makes it possible to write more beautiful code than ever before.
I would be extremely happy to be proven wrong! I love using agents for exploratory prototypes as well as "rote" work, but have yet to see them really pay off when dealing with existing tech debt.
I find that the flaws of agentic workflows tend to be in the vein of "repeating past mistakes", looking at previous debt-riddled files and making an equivalently debt-riddled refactor, despite it looking better on the surface. A tunnel-vision problem of sorts