Refactoring

Biological Parallel

DNA repair mechanisms continuously scan for replication errors and structural damage, excising and replacing corrupted sequences before mutations propagate. Refactoring is organizational DNA repair: identifying suboptimal code structures and replacing them with cleaner implementations while preserving external behavior. Cells that lack mismatch repair accumulate 1000x more mutations and rapidly develop cancer. Codebases that skip refactoring accumulate entropy until system behavior becomes unpredictable and modification becomes impossibly risky.