@gabrielesvelto Or when sed fails you can often write a quick script in Python (or your language of choice).
For real tho I would love to have a dependable refactoring tool that understands syntax, probably something based on Tree Sitter, but I haven't been able to get any working.

@csepp several fancy IDEs already have extremely sophisticate refactoring tools that understand the language syntax, e.g.: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/refactoring-source-code.html

@gabrielesvelto Yup, those are also pretty great.
Personally, I needed to refactor some C++ code that didn't fit any simple regex, so I ended up writing a Lua script to do it and did the rest of it by hand.
The only way I could find to reliably automate it would have been to write a custom clang-tidy pass, which didn't seem worth the effort.
I still wouldn't use an LLM for it, but I do wish there was an easier way to load the code model in a scripting language. To automate the refactor I did I would have needed to track arguments that are passed through variables or that come from function parameters, access non-C++ files (move strings to YAML), rewrite various forms of string concatenation to format strings, etc.

@csepp @gabrielesvelto Doesn't look like lua really has a good binding to libclang but if you used Python you could use the same libraries that clang-format/tidy do. They're using the actual llvm parser and give you an API to manipulate the AST.