Refactoring Is How You Keep Moving Fast

January 1, 2026

Refactoring isn’t a ceremony. It’s not a cleanup phase. It’s not something you “schedule for later.”

It’s how you prevent your team from slowing to a crawl while still shipping features.

Most codebases don’t die because of bad ideas. They die because every new feature costs more than the last one. The system becomes fragile, changes get risky, and engineers start working around the code instead of with it.

Refactoring is the mechanism that keeps the cost of change flat over time.

Not zero. Flat.

Refactoring Is About Preserving Behavior While Changing Structure#

Refactoring has a very specific meaning:

You change how the code is structured without changing what it does.

That constraint matters.

It forces discipline:

• Small steps
• Clear intent
• Continuous verification

You’re not “improving things” in the abstract. You’re reshaping the code so that the next change is easy, obvious, and low-risk.

If behavior changes, you’re no longer refactoring—you’re developing a feature or fixing a bug. Mixing those two is how systems break.

Why Refactoring Is a Feature Development Tool#

Every feature exposes the truth about your system.

If adding something simple requires:

• Touching 12 files
• Copy-pasting logic
• Adding conditionals “just this once”

That’s not bad luck. That’s feedback.

The system is telling you its current shape no longer matches the product you’re building.

Refactoring is how you realign the system with reality.

Before adding a feature, I ask:

Is the code already structured to make this change easy?

If the answer is no, I refactor first.

This almost always makes the overall work faster—not slower—because it removes incidental complexity before it compounds.

Refactoring Is Continuous, Not a Phase#

Healthy teams refactor:

• While reading code they don’t understand
• While extracting logic they need elsewhere
• After a feature works but feels unclear
• When duplication starts to appear
• When responsibilities blur

This is not hero work. It’s maintenance of velocity.

The goal isn’t “clean code.” The goal is code that future you can change without fear.

If you find yourself thinking:

“I’ll remember how this works later”

You won’t.

Refactor now. Your future self is busy shipping.

Small Steps Are the Only Way This Works#

Big rewrites feel productive and usually fail.

Refactoring works because each step is:

• Small
• Behavior-preserving
• Reversible
• Verifiable

You keep the system working at all times. That’s non-negotiable.

This is why tests matter—not because of ideology, but because they make refactoring safe. When tooling exists (IDEs, automated refactors), use it. When it doesn’t, slow down and shrink the steps.

Speed comes from control, not recklessness.

Tools Help, But Discipline Matters More#

Modern IDEs can rename, extract, inline, and move code safely. That’s great. Use them.

LLM-based code assistants are also powerful tools. They can suggest refactorings, spot duplication, and accelerate mechanical transformations. Used well, they reduce friction and help you move faster.

But tools don’t replace judgment.

An IDE doesn’t understand your system. An LLM doesn’t understand your product.

They don’t know which invariants matter, which abstractions are stable, or which shortcuts will become tomorrow’s bottlenecks. They optimize for plausibility and local correctness, not long-term system shape.

You still need to decide:

• What responsibility belongs where
• What abstraction actually reduces complexity
• What should be deleted instead of generalized

If you can’t explain why a refactoring was done, you probably shouldn’t merge it—no matter how clean it looks.

LLMs are best treated like very fast junior engineers: great at execution, dangerous without context, and ineffective without clear direction.

Refactoring is thinking, not formatting.

Refactoring Is an Investment Strategy#

Refactoring is how you:

• Keep feature velocity predictable
• Reduce cognitive load across the team
• Prevent “expert-only” areas of the codebase
• Avoid long stabilization phases
• Scale engineering without scaling pain

If your roadmap assumes constant delivery speed but your codebase gets harder to change every month, the plan is already broken.

Refactoring is how you close that gap.

The Real Test#

Here’s the litmus test I use:

Can a new engineer make a meaningful change in this area without asking for help?

If not, refactoring is already overdue.

Not because the code is “ugly,” but because it’s taxing future execution.

And execution is the whole game.