Refactoring in the Age of AI

AI coding assistants write impressive code. They also destroy carefully balanced codebases the moment you ask them to refactor.

Ask Copilot to extract a method. Watch it miss three call sites. Ask Claude to rename a class. Watch it break imports across 12 files. Ask Cline to simplify a conditional. Watch your tests fail in ways you didn’t know were possible. The problem isn’t that AI is stupid. It’s that refactoring requires something AI assistants don’t have: state, sequences, and safety nets.

Martin Fowler wrote the refactoring playbook 25 years ago. It assumed humans would execute it. What happens when machines try?

This talk explores the collision between classical refactoring wisdom and modern AI capabilities. We’ll dissect why AI assistants fail at refactoring, demonstrate patterns that actually work, and show how to build workflow layers that make AI-assisted refactoring safe and predictable.