8. Refactoring

The valuable edit primitive is rename with propagation, not structural editing. Ordinary text editing plus paren-balancing already covers the rest, and sexp-matching edits fail on formatting drift.

Verified: clojure-lsp 2026.05.05 is installed and its CLI already provides rename --from … --to …, references --from …, --dry (reports diffs, changes nothing), and --filenames / --namespace / --ns-exclude-regex scoping. So references is the cross-reference tool, already built.

Verified limitation: CLI rename is vars and namespaces only. rename --from :node/content returns "Symbol :node/content not found in project".

Four classes rename structurally cannot reach, all live in fluent-platform:

1. Symbol-resolved dispatch. Its own CLAUDE.md warns that a task namespace must be required in gen.interface.daemon or you get :action does not exist — a keyword-keyed registry that a var rename leaves untouched.
2. Non-Clojure artifacts — bb.edn, tests.edn, deps.edn :main-opts, Kamal and Terraform configs.
3. Docstrings and comments — correctly untouched, so prose goes stale silently.
4. cljc/cljs branches — dead cljs refs pass kondo and the frontend CI suite; only a full ClojureScript release build catches them.

The protocol: --dry first, read the diff, apply — then grep the old name across the whole repo including non-Clojure files as a residue check. Text search's over-matching is a liability for finding usages and an asset for verifying zero remain: every surviving hit is either stale prose or a real dynamic reference. That single step is what makes the result trustworthy without manual review.

rename streams edit maps; rename! consumes them. Reviewing before applying is then the default because it is the only shape the data comes in — and edits can be filtered before applying. The safety property is a consequence of the data discipline rather than a rule to remember.

Keywords

Verified keyword census in fluent-platform/src:

kind	count	renameable
namespaced (:node/content, :model/id, :nav/main)	709 distinct	yes, precisely
auto-resolved (::foo)	106 distinct	yes
fully-qualified (:co.multiply.*/kw)	0	n/a
bare :title alone	1214 occurrences	no

The top tier is where the domain vocabulary lives and is a tractable script over kondo's keyword-usages (which records destructuring positions and :reg for schema registrations) even though the LSP CLI will not do it. That is the piece worth building.

For bare keywords, don't build a renamer. It is not a resolution problem but a type problem — which map's :title? Nothing static answers that. Two things help: a census report grouping occurrences by namespace and role (destructure / get / literal map key / schema key), which converts an un-scopable edit into a reviewable list; and using the module's Malli schema as the type-checker — rename there first, run the suite, let failures enumerate the sites.