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Comment by anon22981 | Hacker News Reader

I’m ashamed to admit that I once suddenly realized what I had done: I asked the LLM to rename a variable. It took it some minutes or so. With IDE by hand it would have been seconds.

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The other day I asked it to update a handful of files using a new pattern I built. It was tedious work, and probably would have taken me 10 minutes, but I figure why not just let Claude do it. Well, it spun up multiple agents, each taking a different approach (one writing a Perl script, the other just doing fancy regex, etc) and 30 minutes later had the result. Granted, it wasn't my 30 minutes it was using, but it felt wasteful nonetheless.

Now, if it's something minor, I'll ask Claude about it, and get the gist of what I need to do, and just do it myself.

I'm hard pressed to believe it didn't also take 10 minutes of your time checking in and head shaking and reviewing and testing.

The annoying issue sometimes is that while it is faster to do it yourself, the context of the LLM is not updated. So now you have you to mention that and mentioning it is a bit fuzzier sometimes than the LLM simply doing the rename itself, so the context stays up to date.

The llm will figure it out when it relooks at the file.

This feels like a good place for tighter integration between editors and agents. The editor could notify the agent of user authored changes.

This is very trivial to implement in any serious tool/workflow. I have a version of it in my pi nvim setup.

I'm ashamed that I use a programming language where the IDE can't rename things, so I rely on AI to do it...

Am I the only remaining person who enjoys going through a manual rename as an excuse to review the code and refresh my mental model of it?

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