[qiine]

> grep is one of the worse ways to refactor Hum? care to explain this?

[maccard]

Using Grep or regex is textual refactoring. If you want to rename every reference to a type Foo, how do you is that without touching any variables named foo, or any classes named FooBar

The answer is use tools that have semantic info to rename things.

[true_religion]

I often want them to rename all the textual references too because otherwise you have bunch of variables using the old name as a reference.

Even though it has no semantic significance to the compiler, it does for all the human beings who will read it and get confused.

[shimman]

Another poster mentioned using symbols and references, another way to refactor code programmatically is to make use of code mods. Code mods are very powerful and this is a use case where I find LLMs to shine as the various syntax and language ASTs are hard to remember (even if you do understand what you're doing).