This article explains how to build a "guardrail environment" that leverages AI coding agents like Claude Code and Cursor ...

One thing that most application developers and testers eventually encounter -- especially when working with complex applications or across large teams -- is code smells. "Smelly" code means that the ...

Have you ever tried using an LLM to refactor a legacy system, only to find it "less useful than expected"? When you throw ...

The goal of code refactoring is to fight software entropy and improve nonfunctional attributes of the software. For example, refactoring can help make software code more efficient, resolve bugs, and ...

In the rush to embrace coding assistants like Amazon CodeWhisperer to generate new code for developers, we haven’t spent much time asking if that code is any good. By some measures, the answer is ...

Every day, software developers make decisions that they later regret. They may be tiny decisions, such as the name to use for a variable, or they may be major decisions such as the metaphor to use for ...

When I'm flailing about in code, I often quickly slap something together just to get it working and then go back to clean it up with simpler structures. Real developers commonly refactor their code in ...

On top of all the Visual Studio announcements at Ignite 2019 in Orlando today, Microsoft also shared some notable improvements to Visual Studio IntelliCode, which uses AI to offer intelligent ...

I usually try to follow the advice of the book Working Effectively with Legacy Code. I break dependencies, move parts of the code to @VisibleForTesting public static methods and to new classes to make ...