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Small suggestion on refactors into packages: Move the files manually. Just tell codex "they used to be in different locations, fix it up so it builds".

It seems that the concept of file moving isn't something Codex (and other clis) handle well yet. (Same goes for removing. I've ~never seen success in tracking moves and removes in the git commit if I ask for one)

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Does refactoring mean moving things around for people? Why don't you use your IDE for this, it already handles fixing imports (or use find-replace) and it's faster and deterministic.

Not always, but since OP mentioned it was "deleting and rewriting" files - that's how the CLI agents usually "move" files.

And sure, you can use an IDE, but that's harder to do if you live in vibe land. (We really need to understand that for some things, we have perfectly fine non-AI answers, but that's not the world as it is right now. Mechanical refactors, move + import fixes, autocomplete - all of those do not require an LLM. We're not great at drawing that line yet)

Not necessarily -- in the case I posted about, we first abstracted some common functionality to internal libs, and then further abstracted that functionality into a number of packages (so they could be used by other clients).

So it was part simplification (dedupe+consolidate), and part moving files around.

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