refactor-clean

Clean Refactoring

Replace the old shape with the simpler shape the codebase would want if it were designed today. Refactoring is not adding a compatibility layer beside the problem; it is moving ownership until every concept has exactly one clear home. That cuts both ways: merging N duplicated owners into one, and splitting one over-loaded module into the several owners it was hiding.

Workflow

1. Name the concept that lacks one clear owner — duplicated across several owners, or several concepts fused into one over-loaded module. Identify the thing(s) that should each have one owner: environment, pricing rule, geometry source, state machine, data contract, renderer phase, API shape, UI state, or test oracle.
2. Find every current owner and consumer. Treat wrappers, aliases, pass-local constants, copied structs, and "temporary" branches as sediment until proven otherwise.
3. Promote the concept to its natural home. Pick the module that would own it from scratch, then make old call sites consume that owner directly.
4. Delete or collapse the stale path in the same pass when feasible. If a bridge must remain, make it tiny, named as compatibility, and give it a removal condition.
5. Verify behavior through consumers, not just the new module. A clean refactor is only proven when the surfaces that used to diverge now report or exercise the same source of truth.

Rules

• Every line is debt — the best mechanism is the one you don't write. Before building any guard, validator, convergence protocol, or cleanup path, two checks gate it:
  1. Does the platform already do this? Read the component/framework you are working around before coding around it — its crons, retries, defaults, and lifecycles. A hand-built janitor beside a component that already vacuums itself is pure debt, and it will be debugged by someone who doesn't know the component made it unnecessary.
  2. Does the failure it guards change any real outcome? Trace the guarded condition to its consumer. If the consumer is indifferent — an ordering check feeding a consumer that doesn't care about order, a validation on data only our own code produces — the guard tests nothing and must not be written. A common shape: an invariant re-checked at read time that the single write path already establishes, so the branch can only fire on hand-corrupted rows. Ask which caller could produce the bad state; if the honest answer is "none, short of someone editing the database", delete the branch. "It could be inconsistent" is not a reason; "the consumer would then do the wrong thing" is. The bar is not "is this correct?" — defensive code is usually correct. The bar is "what breaks, for whom, if this line doesn't exist?" No concrete answer → no line.
• Measure the change, and treat a bad size-to-behaviour ratio as a shape defect. Before accepting a change, count what it actually cost — production code apart from tests and docs, and comments apart from logic, because a diff dominated by explanation is not the same as one dominated by machinery: