Being a bit cheeky here -- the amount of comments on this post is a telltale sign of how common / desirable refactoring is for the majority of developers (xD). It isn't our fault though, maybe if those pesky managers read this article then they would understand..

It’s interesting that cyclomatic complexity or cognitive complexity scales with token usage. A codebase that enforces upper bounds on one of these two also (potentially) helps AI agents stay efficient.

Interesting take-away:

> Claude is unable to look at code, look at refactorings in general and work out which are suitable to apply: a human needs to actively guide it.

Claude is happy to produce a very large Rust file. But you need human guidance to make it smaller.

the punchline: "Refactoring reduces token consumption"

I appreciate Martin's effort to quantify the benefit rather than pontificate. It's worth mentioning Martin wrote a whole book on refactoring [1], in which he states, "to refactor, the essential precondition is [...] solid tests", which I think is the real benefit here, AI or not. Good tests protect against regressions, whether human or robot. They also help encode the spec, which humans and robots can read.

[1] https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/refactoring-improving-t...

It's very interesting to have some data on this.

It matches my experience which is that LLMs greatly benefit from well factored code, but are not particularly adept at creating such code.

Much like most human developers I suppose!