It's not unlike some managers who tell their teams to do something trivially easy that they could have done themselves.

(I'm not saying this is ideal and I'm not defending my laziness. It's just the current state of things.)

Even the doFoo to performBar is tedious because you need to catch all instances and your find/replace script strategy might have unintended victims.

In this case indeed, it's just much more convenient.

1. Find the code you want to change

2. Run the tests to confirm that test coverage is good for the starting point

3. Track down everywhere else that might call or interact with that code

4. Update the tests (red/green TDD)

5. Alter the code

6. Update the things that call the code

7. Run the tests again

8. Apply linters/formatters

9. Address any feedback from linters

10. Check to see if any documentation needs updating and do that

11. Land a commit with a descriptive commit message

I can get all of that done with a coding agent with a single sentence prompt - especially if it's already in a session where it knows that I do "red/green TDD".

... and then I can work on something else while the agent is churning through those steps.

This has a list, but some of them that I've used extensively:

- Rename anything, can also do smart renames that apply patterns, deal with capitalization differences, pluralization, etc

- Move function, constant to a different file

- Change function signature, including adding, removing, reordering, and renaming arguments

- Turn a chunk of code into a constant, variable, or function, including replacing other similar patterns or calculations with the new constant/variable/function

- Inline any of the above.

- Replace a class with an interface, have the class implement the interface... same with field accesses

- Move functions up/down the type hierarchy

I'm sure there's others. This has all been there for at least a decade.

Mature workflows for those kinds of tasks have been mostly ubiquitous across professional-grade engineering tools like those from JetBrains or Visual Studio itself for longee than many people here have even been working in the trade.

It's clearly not the case for simonw, but much of what many people task AI tools to do foe them are only a novelty for the "VS Code"-type users who stubbornly refused to explore more professional-grade paid tools in the past.

Yet for many tasks, those mature paid tools provided reliable and efficient features that make the AI approach look like an expensive, slow, and dangerously nondeterministic regression.