I worked at a fairly big tech co years before the AI boom. People did large scale refractoring across huge code bases back then. With refactoring tools. And properly written robots.

Applying changes to code at scale, opening PRs automatically, basic interaction with human reviewers, making sure tests pass, getting things merged when ready. All that already existed before LLMs. And it was actually reliable and not capable of hallucinating terrible things.

It's like we've forgotten how to automate things without LLMs and openclaw now...