agent-refactoring-workflowlisted

# Agent refactoring workflow Agents are effective at mechanical restructuring and prone to changing behaviour while doing it. Working in verified steps is what keeps a refactor a refactor rather than an unreviewable rewrite. ## Method 1. **Establish test coverage first.** Refactoring without tests is rewriting and hoping, and the agent should add characterisation tests before changing anything (see refactoring). 2. **State the target structure.** What the code should look like afterwards, since an agent asked to improve it will change things you did not want changed. 3. **Work in small verified steps.** One transformation, run the tests, commit. Large refactors in one turn are unreviewable and hard to bisect (see pull-request-size). 4. **Forbid behaviour changes explicitly.** Say that the refactor must preserve behaviour exactly, and treat any behaviour change as a separate commit (see negative-instructions). 5. **Review the diff yourself.** Agent refactors touch many files, and an unreviewed large diff is where unintended changes hide. 6. **Keep tests untouched during the refactor.** Changing tests and implementation together removes the safety net entirely. 7. **Commit at every green point.** Frequent commits make it trivial to discard a bad step rather than unpicking it (see git-workflow). ## Boundaries Refactoring preserves behaviour and does not fix design problems that need a rethink. Agents can miss subtle behavioural differences t