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Martin Fowler0 Hot0 comments17 min read
The Economic Benefit of Refactoring
An experiment measuring the economic impact of refactoring on AI agent token consumption. A 17,155-line Rust data access layer was refactored in 15 steps using Claude Code, while a sub-agent repeatedly applied the same representative change after each step to measure token cost. Input tokens for the same task dropped from 159,564 to 27,360 — an 83% reduction — as the largest file shrank from 17K to 3.7K lines. The key insight: agents read less code when it's well-structured, but only if the structure allows them to identify the minimal relevant subset. The post also notes Claude's limitations in autonomous refactoring — it required human guidance to identify and apply refactorings, and missed the most impactful step on the first pass.
Source: https://martinfowler.com/articles/exploring-gen-ai/refactoring-economic-benefit.html. 8sync News only summarizes and links out; content copyright belongs to the authors and original sources.
