My point is that all these steps can be done very quickly by even a junior developer who knows emacs or their IDE, in a codebase with existing lint/format/test automation, without even taking their hands off the keyboard. You're already in your IDE, you can probably do it just as fast there. I don't see the cost/benefit of spending tokens and hitting a server for this kind of work.

I guess the difference may be in people's mode of AI working: Do you primarily develop in your IDE or a bunch of terminals running vim, and occasionally fire up claude to do more complex things? Or do you primarily develop in a long-lasting claude terminal, and occasionally tab over to the IDE to watch/codereview? In other words: What dev tool is on your primary monitor and what's on your secondary monitor? It's getting hard for developers in one camp to discuss coding and see eye-to-eye with developers from the other camp.

Those 11 steps would probably take me 15 minutes.

There are a lot of small refactorings that I wouldn't consider to be worth 15 minutes of my time, so I wouldn't do them.

Outsourcing those to an agent means I don't have to make that tradeoff, which means I can get better quality code.

But yes, for a lot of my work I'm now a Claude Code / Codex first developer. I run Zed so I can navigate the code and occasionally make small edits.

When you make the change on an IDE, you:

1 - Find the code

4 - Move the code

10 - Change the documentation

You don't do the other steps because it's deterministic and always correct.

Presumably you're talking about statically typed languages? I mainly work in Python and JavaScript.

I don't trust any refactors until I've seen the test suite pass.

(OK, sure, "rename method" might be OK, but most of my refactors and design changes are more interesting than that.)

I develop with a very custom neovim using only the keyboard. Over the years I've become really fast. And yet I'm doing it less and less myself and ask the LLM even small things. In my case the switch happened naturally as I moved to local AI and fully integrated the coding harness into my tmux + neovim workflow. Neovim becomes more of a project and file explorer, together with lazygit to diff review the changes.