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Argument: Agents Removed the 'I Got Lost in This Code' Signal That Used to Trigger Refactoring
A September 2 essay argues that the human refactoring reflex was historically fired by cognitive strain, and that since agents navigate tangled codebases without that strain, nothing now flags accumulating complexity until no developer on the team can reason about key parts and reviews degrade into rubber stamps. The author is explicit that this is a pattern noticed anecdotally in daily agent work, with no case studies or measurements behind it. The interesting turn is the economic one: clean modular code cuts token cost and hallucination rate, so refactoring pays off for the agent even where no human is reading.
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