it can do it already, the trick is to prompt it to approach it how a human would.

1. use a temp file as a reference for the entire refactor

2. make it plan the entire thing, tell it to use a high level and low level checklists, tell it to take notes for itself, and tell it to use the temp file as a scratchpad for taking notes and storing code blocks.

3. tell it to do small incremental changes, and do bottoms up approach.

It can already, try cursor composer or copilot edit sessions.

I find that even CoPilot can do this pretty quickly if you do one example refactor and then prompt it to repeat the example on all the files from a find and search.

Since that's already a huge speed up, I'm sure many of these agents can do the same.

And now Claude can do it with the right MCPs installed + smart prompts