Are people really using LLMs this way? Can't your IDE at least attempt global refactorings? I get that it's harder with dynamic languages like Python but using an LLM to rename a class seems like using a nuke to crack a nut.

For sure, it was a bit of a simplified example, but you can imagine prompts that are asking the LLM to touch dozens of files at once. A lot of people will use fairly high level requests, "make a screen in my app that does this" and that ends up making screens, components, queries, local state changes, etc etc. It adds up quick having so much in the context at once (and if you /clear the context and ask it to do anything more than one off changes in a file, it's gonna grep and glob it's way through your code looking for the right files)