Using IDE Refactoring Tools in AI Coding Agents

AI coding agents almost always go at refactoring head-on: they have the model grep through files, then rewrite the code wholesale and hope it got everything right. Even the most capable LLMs slip in this mode — they miss a call site at the other end of the project, break inheritance, lose usages in tests and config files. The problem isn't the model; it's the tools it was handed. And yet, tools that do exactly this job — and do it precisely — have been sitting right there for thirty years: IDE refactoring engines. Rename, extract method, change signature, inline — these are all operations on the parse tree, with full type and usage information, that preserve program behavior. They can be handed to an agent as tools instead of text editing.