Beyond Text Rewrites: The Shift to AST-Aware Code Refactoring for AI Agents
Emma Johnson
The rapid adoption of AI coding assistants has fundamentally changed how software engineers write, debug, and explore codebases. Tools like Claude Code, Cursor, and Windsurf have made generating snippets and explaining logic near-instantaneous. However, as developers push these systems to handle larger engineering tasks—such as codebase-wide refactoring or porting legacy applications—they inevitably hit a wall: the token limits and structural inaccuracy of file-based operations. Traditionally, w