Refactoring

Refactoring is like organizing your closet. The clothes are the same, just sorted and put away, so you find things faster later. Common refactors: splitting a component with hundreds of lines into smaller ones, pulling repeated code into a shared function, giving variables clearer names, and making API calls follow one consistent pattern.

The key is "don't change what it does." If you add new features while refactoring and something breaks, you can't tell which step caused it. So refactoring and adding features are best done separately, with each step checkable on its own.

After a project built with AI grows for a while, you often see the same feature written several ways, files getting bigger and bigger, and fixing one thing breaking another. Those are signs it's time to refactor. Commit with Git before refactoring, and check the main pages and features one by one afterward.