The Future of Refactoring: Test Driven Navigation By Alex Bunardzic

AI promised to solve the endless chore of refactoring, but its tendency to deliver massive, uncontrolled changes often creates more problems than it solves. This talk introduces Test-Driven Navigation (TDN), a practical workflow to tame your AI assistant. By providing failing tests as hyper-specific instructions, we can force AI to work in safe, incremental steps. Learn how to combine principles from Extreme Programming (the 3 C's) with the power of modern AI to keep your code continuously working, transform your refactoring process, and elevate your role from a hands-on coder to a strategic system architect.What You Will Learn:Why "prompt-driven development" often fails and leads to the much dreaded "Big Bang" delivery model.How to apply the "Permaculture by Succession" philosophy to evolve software design safely.A live-coded demonstration of the Test-Driven Navigation (Red-Green-Refactor) cycle with an AI partner.How this approach transforms code review: "writing the next test is the code review."The future role of the developer is not obsolete; it's being elevated from a mechanic to a race engineer, from a coder to an architect.The talk is targeted to advanced software professionals.