Freeze Return Values, Then Budget the Diff: Two Gates for a Refactor You Can Actually Review
This story is from 2026-11-05. It is preserved in the archive; the latest stories are on the live feed.
A recurring failure mode in inherited codebases looks like this: a module has no tests, an AI agent produces a 900-line "cleanup" diff in one pass, and the reviewer approves it because the code reads better. Two weeks later a downstream report is off by a few cents and nobody can tell which of the…
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- 2026-11-05 15:24 · DEV Community — AI
Freeze Return Values, Then Budget the Diff: Two Gates for a Refactor You Can Actually Review