refactor-proposal

Use when planning, writing, or reviewing a refactor. Covers writing a refactor proposal (the ask, the benefits, what changes), deciding whether a new requirement needs a refactor first, hunting duplicated code and duplicated payloads, replacing flags and hard-coded values, centralizing error handling, judging a refactor pull request by how the tests changed, and automating validation with sample data. Use it whenever someone says "refactor", "clean this up before we add X", "this isn't scalable", "too many if/else", "we keep copying this", or a new requirement does not fit the current design, even if they never say "refactor".