Refactoring Worm

Noun · Hacker Culture

Definitions

  1. A joking metaphor for the urge to keep refactoring deeper and deeper once you start touching a code path, expanding a small change into a much larger cleanup effort. It names the slippery slope between useful improvement and uncontrolled scope growth.

    In plain English: The tendency for a small code cleanup to keep expanding into much bigger refactoring.

    Example: "I opened one file to rename a method and the refactoring worm turned it into a three-day cleanup."

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