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Refactoring is not a beginner skill. Ask Claude 3 or ChatGPT to give you a few examples with like 5-15 lines of code. But don't give them that until they have some experience.

Code isn't easy to understand for beginners. They need practice reading code.

Giving a beginner 1500 lines of code to refactor is ludicrous.

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They have been programming for two months so they are not total beginners, they just have no notion of best practices. They already wrote two 300-line programs. The goal would be to have them read a codebase they didn't write, and optimize it.

I'm not looking for expert refactoring or sophisticated design patterns (they haven't even touched OOP), I just want to show them simple ways to improve their code.

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