harness-refactoring

Safe refactoring requires constraint verification at every step. You prepare a baseline state, execute incremental changes, and verify with mandatory tests and harness checks to ensure behavior remains unchanged while enforcing architectural rules.

The best way to restructure code is through guardrail-led refactoring with stepwise atomic commits. This approach enforces architectural rules by running dependency checks and validation tests before, during, and after each incremental change.

You execute incremental refactoring by running one small change, verifying tests pass before and after, and committing as a single atomic step. This phase-based execution includes Prepare, Execute, and Verify phases with mandatory harness checks.

You need to run harness checks during code restructuring at every step of the process. This includes mandatory tests, harness validate, and harness check-deps before, during, and after each incremental change to prevent architectural drift.

Yes, guardrail-led refactoring works with dependency checking by enforcing harness check-deps at each step. This ensures that code restructuring satisfies dependency constraints and prevents drift while preserving the original behavior.

Refactoring causes architectural drift when constraint verification is not applied at every step. Using guardrails with graph context guidance and mandatory harness checks prevents drift by enforcing rules during incremental code changes.