Picking on a particular nit here, but I think it is indicative of the broader flaw with this argument:

To rename `PostgreSQLClient`, I press F2 and type the new name, and I'm done.

I don't have to wait for an agent to "perform the refactor, update references, run the tests, fix the missing pieces, and mark the relevant checkboxes in the ticket" (btw, what checkboxes..?)

I press a key, type my change, and I'm done.

Wasting time waiting for tokens is also wasting time.

Despite having long valued statically typed languages, and IDEs with excellent refactoring tools (VS + ReSharper was a godsend back in the day before MS implemented most of the must-have features themselves)... I sort of disagree.

The problem is the IDE refactor->rename updates the code but the agent's "rename" will also catch developer-facing documentation in text files, comments, etc. that referenced the old name. It will often even catch reflection code that referred to the old name in a string. And it will do the mental work of disambiguating "this reference is something else that shouldn't be updated, that one is really pointing at the thing that got renamed and should be updated". If asked to, it can catch things like "var postGresClient = new PostgreSQLClient()" and change them to "var dbClient = new DatabaseClient()".

My preconception was: the IDE feature is deterministic and works every time. The LLM may hallucinate and fail to correctly do the rename, so it's both slower and worse.

My actual experience has been: So far, I've never actually seen Opus or GPT5.5 hallucinate and fail at a simple refactoring task like this, but I have had numerous instances where it caught extra stuff that a deterministic rename never could, and therefore did the task slower and much better.

I hate it because it feels lazy and stupid to type "do this trivial thing for me" into a prompt box. But dammit, it works too well.

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