I’m pretty sure (based on the last time I saw this) that this is just good old fashioned computer science.[1]
I really hope that HN hasn’t forgotten about good old fashioned computer science stuff already.
[1] All the algorithm and whatnot stuff, not the spooky machine learning stuff. Even things like Prolog-for-AI, although that has the slight downside of not working (for the purposes of making AI).
I do get that it will reject a lot of stuff as not working (and has to even in the target language) and I also get that algol-like languages are all very similar, but I am still surprised that it works well enough to function on ~arbitrary languages.
These are very LLM-era properties for a program to have. The question is not "does it work for language x" but "how well does it work for language x", and the answer is not "is it one of the languages it was designed for" but instead "idunno try it out and see".
I am sure in 2006 or so I was doing "extract method" in Resharper. And Lispers probably doing it for centuries ;)
And that is enough when:
1. Most code in a code file is irrelevant to whatever specifc bug is being looked at.
2. It is removal of code at play not writing code.