the.com/refactor
rearranging the furniture without changing the address.
means restructuring existing code to improve its design or readability without altering what it actually does.
from the term crystallized in the 1990s smalltalk community, formalized by martin fowler's 1999 book refactoring, which turned a quiet engineering habit into a named discipline.
tests firstsafe refactoring requires tests to prove nothing broke
not rewritingbehavior stays identical, only structure changes
technical debtrefactoring is how you pay it down