Refactor or Rot: Building a self-improving codebase

Your coding agents run in loops: plan, implement, test, repeat. This inner loop focuses on completing a task, and it tends to get all the attention.

But there’s an outer loop, too. Each agent builds on the codebase the last one left behind, inheriting its patterns, abstractions, and shortcuts. Those patterns can make the codebase easier to understand, maintain, and extend, or compound complexity and make future changes riskier.

In this talk, I’ll show you how to build an outer loop that reinforces code quality and counteracts decay. Drawing on classic software design and refactoring techniques, we’ll equip an agent with skills to identify code smells, reason about coupling and module boundaries, and recommend refactors that make future changes easier. We’ll wire that analysis into the development lifecycle, running on PRs and across the codebase, weighing each recommendation’s benefit against its cost and risk.

You’ll learn when to refactor, when to leave working code alone, and how to make refactoring part of your development workflow, so your coding agents leave behind codebases that are better, not just bigger.