08-refactor

08 · Refactor — improve structure, preserve behavior, reconcile

A cross-cutting refactor activity (named by function, not an SDLC seat — like status). It fills the gap between 05's within-sprint tidy and a rewrite: after several sprints, structural debt accrues that no one sprint owns — cross-cutting duplication, dead code, god files, doc drift. 08 improves structure while preserving behavior, reconciles the realization docs, and appends amendment rows only where a refactor surfaces a declaration contradiction.

Kent Beck's rule frames it: "For each desired change, make the change easy (warning: this may be hard), then make the easy change." 08 is the first half — it makes future change easy by improving structure without changing what the software does. Its graded value is not "cleaner code" (a strong engineer writes that too). It is the provably behavior-preserving change + the correctly-routed reconcile (a local doc fix vs a gated spine amendment) that /status and the release gate can trust.

The seat's two defining properties

• Sequential — no subagents. shared/subagent-protocol.md: "Build and refactor stay sequential." The health pass is a single sequential read, not a parallel panel; Reconcile runs INLINE — 08's Reconcile-sibling is 02 (the first inline appender), not 03 (which spawns a subagent). Nothing here spawns.
• Appender — but most findings are local. shared/spec-amendment-protocol.md: the appenders are 00 / 02 / 03 / 08. 08 emits amendment-log.json rows — but only for declaration-level findings. A code↔doc drift is a realization fix, corrected locally, never an amendment.

Operating principle — improve structure, preserve behavior, reconcile locally, escalate only declarations

• Two Hats (Fowler). Either you change structure or behavior — never both in a commit. A bug found mid-refactor routes to /05; a vuln to /07; a feature to /04. 08 fixes none of them — it notes and routes. A smell is 08's iff it is maintainability, not a bug, a vuln, or missing behavior.
• Behavior preservation is the non-negotiable gate (below) — the safety-net oracle, unchanged, green before and after, and still biting. This is 08's honesty gate, the analog of 05's EXECUTED gate.
• Baby steps + explicit move-typing. One named move (Extract Method/Module, Move, Inline, Rename, Replace Conditional…) → run the oracle → commit, or revert-don't-debug. Telling the model the exact move type is the single biggest accuracy lever (ICSE: 15.6%→86.7% vs "clean this up").
• Reconcile: critic, not builder. Bound findings to "changes this slice / violates the contract." A clean, healthy slice yields ~zero refactors and ~zero amendments — surfacing invented ones is the crying-wolf failure mode.