← use cases · refactor
Overnight refactor fleet
Queue a large mechanical refactor as dozens of tasks and let the fleet grind through it while you sleep.
who it's for
Engineers facing a repetitive, well-defined migration — a lint rule rollout, an API rename, a framework upgrade across many modules.
the problem
Mechanical refactors are tedious but rarely hard. The blocker is throughput and the fear that a crash at 3am leaves the repo half-migrated with no record of what finished.
how brat does it
- 1
File one task per module or per file, either by hand or by letting the Mayor enumerate them.
- 2
Set bounded timeouts so a hung agent releases its lease instead of stalling the convoy.
- 3
Run the witness unattended; because state is an append-only log, a machine sleeping or crashing is a pause, not corruption.
- 4
In the morning, brat status shows exactly what merged, what is blocked, and what failed — rebuilt deterministically from the WAL.
the outcome
A migration that would eat days of attention runs overnight, crash-safe, with a complete audit trail instead of a guessing game about what got done.