Everything is just one more prompt away, I swear — literally like a gambling addict with a slot machine.

You forgot the premise of the article and why the proposed solutions were not good. It was not the complexity of a solution: they were simple fast fixes like a tape on a leak, but the hacky tape they were.

(of course I tried, the code after “refactor” is still shit unless you start going very explicit about it at a point of being better and faster of doing it yourself)