I still do a lot of refactoring by hand. With vim bindings it’s often quicker than trying to explain to a clumsy LLM how to do it.

For me, refactoring is really the essence of coding. Getting the initial version of a solution that barely works —- that’s necessary but less interesting to me. What’s interesting is the process of shaping that v1 into something that’s elegant and fits into the existing architecture. Sanding down the rough edges, reducing misfit, etc. It’s often too nitpicky for an LLM to get right.

There are lots of project templates and generators that will get you close to where you can start writing business code and not just boilerplate.