In The Future of Refactoring: Test-Driven Navigation, Alex Bunardzic argues that AI’s promise to handle all your code cleanup often backfires with massive, uncontrolled rewrites. Instead, he introduces Test-Driven Navigation (TDN)—feeding your AI assistant hyper-specific failing tests as prompts so it only makes safe, incremental changes.
Drawing on Extreme Programming’s 3 Cs and the “Permaculture by Succession” philosophy, TDN keeps your code always working and transforms refactoring into a strategic, step-by-step process. A live Red-Green-Refactor demo shows how writing the next test becomes the new code review, shifting the developer’s role from mechanic to system architect.
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