Refactoring RN

Github copilot came out in 2021 and Open Rewrite joined Commonhaus in 2024. In this age of AI and other powerful tools why should a developer take the time to learn manual refactoring? Or even plan and execute their own novel refactorings?

This talk will delve into these questions with humor and the introduction of a novel refactoring. The new refactoring allows the developer to change the return type of a method without breaking the code even when the method is used many places.

The audience for this session are software developers and the people that interface with them (product owners, scrum masters, development managers) who need to know the value of this important and often neglected technical practice.

At the end of the session, the attendee will be able to identify hidden patterns in their code bases, plan a refactor effort on legacy codebases, write their own refactorings, and know when to use AI or other tools to perform the refactoring.