What We Talk About When We Talk About Refactoring

A few years ago, I worked with a developer who took a kind of minimalist pride in his code. Everything was perfectly indented, alphabetized, and aggressively compact. Variable names were stripped down to single characters. Functions were so short they looked like haikus. You could stare at one of his files and almost admire the elegance of it, like a blank canvas with just a few brushstrokes.

And then he went on vacation.

As you might guess, something broke. Nothing catastrophic, just a small feature that suddenly stopped working. I thought it’d be a five-minute fix. Instead, I spent six hours spelunking. Every line was tidy, but none of it made sense.

As it turned out, his obsession with tidiness had made the code less readable, less maintainable, and way harder to fix. There was no friction, no duplication, and no context. It was like trying to read a poem where every word had been replaced with a variable.

When he came back, I confronted him about it. He shrugged and said, “It’s efficient, though.”

That’s the myth.

Somewhere along the way, we started treating “clean” as the goal — as if reducing line count or following a style guide is the same thing as making the code better. But real refactoring isn’t about tidying up. It’s about reclaiming clarity. It’s about helping the next person (or your future self) understand what the code is trying to say.

Refactoring: A Conversation, Not A Cleanup Job

It's easy to think that refactoring is a kind of "housekeeping"... but it’s not what you do when you’re “done” coding and want to make things pretty. It’s what you do while you’re trying to understand what the code is doing — and what it’s trying to hide.

Start with a mindset shift:

You’re not cleaning code. You’re listening to it.

Good refactoring begins with curiosity. You notice that two functions are a little too similar. That this class is doing three different jobs. That the same transformation shows up in six places with slight differences. You pause. You ask: Why is this like this? What was this code trying to do? What’s the real shape of the problem hiding inside these lines?

That’s the mindset: you’re not making code look nicer. You’re making it tell the truth.

When you refactor, your job isn’t to remove mess; it’s to reveal meaning.

Sometimes that means collapsing things. Sometimes it means splitting them apart. Sometimes it means renaming a variable from x to cart_total_in_cents and calling it a day. Whatever the move, the goal is always the same: Can the next person look at this and understand what’s going on without guessing?

Because the day something breaks... and it will break... clarity will matter more than cleverness.

Tactics and Tools: Moves That Make Code Make Sense

Once you start looking for clarity instead of cleanliness, your refactoring toolbox gets a lot more interesting. You’re not polishing, but shaping. The tools at your disposal aren’t fancy, but they’re powerful when used with intention.

Here are a few essential moves:

🧪 Use Tests as Guardrails

Start with this... because you can’t refactor safely without feedback. Even just a few basic tests can give you the confidence to pull things apart and put them back together.

Bonus: If a section is hard to test, that’s a clue that the design wants refactoring.

🪪 Rename for Meaning

• x becomes cart_total_in_cents
• process() becomes apply_discount_and_send_receipt()

Naming things well is a form of refactoring. It reduces cognitive load without changing a single logic path. This often gets overlooked, but it dramatically improves readability.

🧶 Extract to Untangle

Static analysis tools like Snyk or Sonar call this "Cyclomatic Complexity" or "Cognitive Complexity"... the shorthand is that the more nested your code gets, the harder it is to understand. When you have loops and branches combined, the flow of the code becomes almost impossible to follow.

Take a nested if block and move it into a function with a name that explains what it’s doing.

Break large functions into smaller ones, each describing a step of the process.

If two concerns are mashed together, pull them apart — even if only into two functions side-by-side.

🔄 Inline and Flatten

This may seem contradictory to the previous tip... but there are some cases where you should NOT have extra methods: for example, if the purpose of the method is only a single line and only called from one place. In this case, it makes better sense to flatten the code, eliminate the extra function call and be more logically direct.

The lesson to take away from here is that the right tool might change in the middle of the job. Don't become subservient to a single school of thought!

♻️ Remove Duplication (Carefully)

Duplication isn’t always bad. But accidental or inconsistent duplication can be a sign that logic is in the wrong place.

If you copy-paste and then change something in one place but not the other — congratulations, you’ve created a future bug.

An important note about refactoring:

You don’t need to do all of this at once. You don’t need to do any of it perfectly. But each small refactor, each name clarified, and each concern untangled leaves the code a little easier to read, a little safer to change. And that's your purpose: make it safe to change things.

Recap: Refactoring Is How Code Learns to Speak Clearly

Refactoring isn’t about “clean code” trophies or following style guides to the letter. It’s not about making things look nice.

It’s about making things make sense.

When we refactor, we’re not tidying; we’re translating. We’re shaping the code so that what it means becomes as clear as what it does. That might mean renaming something, splitting a giant function into two smaller ones, or just inlining a helper function that got a little too helpful.

The tools aren’t complicated. But the mindset matters.

Don’t ask, “Is this code clean?”
Ask, “Will this make sense to someone who didn’t write it?”

The next time you're tempted to refactor for the sake of order, remember: clarity isn’t always tidy. And tidiness isn’t always clear.

Clarity is what lets us move faster, fix things sooner, and trust our code enough to change it. And that’s the kind of refactoring that’s always worth doing.