alt Hacker NewsI asked an agent for some high level cleanup and refactoring. I found that I ended up disagreeing with most of the structural changes. Some of them were necessary, some were beneficial, but largely it turned straight line code into abstract factory manager type stuff.
More broadly I've found that making code more elegant (e.g. by removing duplication) increases the cognitive load, because now you can't just read the code anymore but need to mentally "decompress" the higher level structures and indirection into the straight line code, the "code that actually runs."
If it wasn't clear, I don't ask the agent to "clean up my code". I ask it to "take this map[string]string you pass around with constant keys and turn that into a structure" or "extract this API provider out into an interface and make everything using it use this interface instead" or other concrete instructions.
LLMs, to a first approximation, already did as well as they could on the first pass. You can get a bit more out of them by asking them to just try harder, but not much. Whereas if you go in with specific changes they are pretty good at implementing them.
This especially matters because my personal style deviates from the common practices. This may also be why I can't get it to just happen by prompting for it. But if you walk it through it's perfectly capable of transforming the code into a better style, and it's still way faster than trying to write it from scratch.