Letting the editor refactor a file I'm scared of

There's a right order here and I learned it by doing it wrong first.

Step three is the part that makes it yours: rewrite the first and last line by hand. Those two lines are where it stops sounding like everyone else. Cursor helps here because it writes and refactors across your whole repo, not one file at a time.

Name the file something you'll find later. Future you is not as clever as present you thinks.

Step one is the boring one people skip: get the input clean before the tool touches it. Garbage in is still garbage out, no matter how good the model is.

The one time it went wrong, I'd skipped cleaning the input. Every error traced back to that.

The win was boring: I finished, and I finished sooner. That's the whole point.