Programming

23631 readers

195 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Follow the programming.dev instance rules
Keep content related to programming in some way
If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

snowe@programming.dev

Ategon@programming.dev

MaungaHikoi@lemmy.nz

UlrikHD@programming.dev

Would you use a service that automatically identifies refactoring opportunities in your code? (feddit.org)

submitted 1 month ago by YUART@feddit.org to c/programming@programming.dev

19 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Hey,

I’m exploring the idea of a webpage where you can paste a function (or a block of code) in any programming language, and it outputs a list of specific, actionable refactoring suggestions - things like:

Unnecessary complexity
Poor naming conventions
Duplicated logic
Violations of language-specific best practices
Readability issues

The goal is to help developers quickly spot areas for improvement and make their code cleaner, more maintainable, and easier to understand.

Questions for you:

Would you use such a tool? Why or why not?
What features would make it important for you? (e.g., integration with GitHub, support for obscure languages, explanations for each suggestion, etc.)
Are you ready to pay for a tool like this (for example, paying for access to advanced checks or being able to tune checks for your programming style)?
Are there existing tools you love (or hate) that do something similar?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] achacon@lile.cl 2 points 1 month ago (3 children)

@YUART what would be tje difference to do it with Zed or Avante (nvim) directly? I already ask sometimes to my editor for refactor a code. I also somtimes copy and paste it to Lumo (from proton)

[–] YUART@feddit.org -1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I believe those are tools that use general-purpose LLMs, which aren't tuned for refactoring specifically. So I guess a specifically tuned tool for refactoring will beat those you mentioned in refactoring tasks.

I also imagine a tool that is not AI-driven. While AI will be used for sure for some checks, I believe static checks and other "computable" heuristics will produce better output faster. I don't want to throw a bunch of prompts into AI and sell mediocre-quality software to people.

But overall, I think about what you said, but from another perspective - why have a separate webpage if such of helper can be built into IDE/editor? I think this is harder to do than to create a webpage, but maybe this will be better for users (developers).

[–] achacon@lile.cl 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

@YUART yes too, i thibk will be hard to hace another tab just for that purpose. And for refactoring you must know what refactor, I mean, I know when a name is no the best or the code was repeated or a code produce a n+1 problem, so when I ask for refactor to an LLM I make a specific query and not just: refactor it

[–] YUART@feddit.org 1 points 1 month ago

That's true, and that's a hard part. I have some ideas on how to solve that problem, but I can't prove anything because this is the first time I'm working on a helper like that one.

That's also the reason why I decided to ask people - there is no point in engaging in complex problem-solving, like for that tool, to only find out that no one actually needs it

load more comments (1 replies)