Safe Renaming

When to Use This Skill

Activate this skill whenever the user asks for rename requests (e.g., "Rename X to Y across the codebase", "tree-wide rename", "safely rename ..."), or any renaming of variables, fields, functions, parameters, or types across files in the codebase.

Mandate: No Scripts of Any Kind

Scripts of ANY kind (shell scripts like perl, sed, awk, python, bash, fish, or custom/disposable Rust scripts compiled via rustc) are STRICTLY PROHIBITED for performing code refactoring or modifications. All changes must be performed file-by-file using native file-editing tools (replace_file_content / multi_replace_file_content) combined with AST-level semantic tools (rust-analyzer).

Workflow: Safe Staged Refactoring Protocol

To ensure safety during multi-file refactoring, follow this protocol:

Step 1: Optional BTRFS Staging Copy

For large changes, use cp --reflink=auto to create a lightweight, near-instant BTRFS CoW snapshot copy of the workspace in ~/Downloads/rename-staging/.

# Ensure any previous staging directory is clean
rm -rf ~/Downloads/rename-staging

# Create BTRFS reflink clone
cp --reflink=auto -r ~/github/roc ~/Downloads/rename-staging

Step 2: Systematic File-by-File Native Edits

Perform the refactoring file-by-file using native file editing tools (replace_file_content / multi_replace_file_content) and semantic AST tools:

1. Search and inspect target occurrences using AST references or grep.
2. Carefully apply edits line-by-line or chunk-by-chunk to preserve surrounding rustdoc, formatting, and comments.
3. Beware of local variable shadowing (e.g. let vp_width = ... shadowing vp_width(...)).

Step 3: Incremental Validation

After modifying a batch of 3-5 files, run validation commands:

./check.fish --check
./check.fish --clippy
./check.fish --test
./check.fish --quick-doc

Step 4: Final Verification

Run full workspace verification on the live repository to confirm 100% clean compilation, zero lint warnings, and all tests passing:

./check.fish --full

Pitfalls & Safeguards

• Substrings in Trait/Method names: Ensure identifiers are properly bounded and not partially matching unrelated symbols.
• Module Shadowing: Watch out for local variable names (let vp_width = ...) that shadow constructor helper functions (vp_width(...)).
• Doc Comment Integrity: Ensure plain English prose in doc comments is not inadvertently changed when updating code symbols.
• No Scripts: Never reach for sed/awk/python/rust scripts to automate text replacements.