[madmountaingoat]

It's all solid advice but that exchange in #5 that the author found delightful, drives me bonkers. If you talk to the people on your team like that, you're not being helpful, you're being an a-hole. I realize its just making a point in the context of the article, but this industry seems to collect pedants, so it seems worth pointing out as an anti-pattern.

[zingar]

Article author here, this is a really good point and I can see how that exchange might undermine the point (or even the entire article) for some readers.

I think I understand it as fighting fire with fire: that people who are enthusiastic about refactoring without understanding and writing tests are prone to pushing their agenda without really engaging on the substantive points (as in someone who talks "refactoring" without taking in how central automated tests are in the refactoring community). Such a person sometimes needs a confrontational push to go back to the basics on this point.