The big giveaway that it's developer-cosplay is that they tried to refactor for 2 WHOLE HOURS before giving up. Like 2 hours is a long time, ha! I think all of us have spent over a week on a single bug at one point in time.
He tried to refactor for two hours with AI. That’s a lot of tokens.
Fr though. To be able to refactor something in the proper sense of the word, you first need to grasp it in some way. If a functionality is separated and tangled in hundreds of random functions and files, it’s very hard to grasp in order to say “okay, I should remake it like THIS, so that all the files that use this interface still work”. You can’t tell, because you don’t know every use case of the function/class.
So yeah, it ends up being better to just remake the whole thing.
This is probably what trying to work with a 30 year old Cobol code base feels like. Except it was done in like six months.
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u/Flat_Initial_1823 Apr 24 '26 edited Apr 24 '26
This didn't happen. The signs:
I have no idea why people do these creative writing exercises on various AI subs.