What is refactor vs rewrite?

Refactor vs rewrite is a concept in personal epistemology: Sometimes you should improve an existing agent; sometimes you should replace it entirely.

Example: Your morning planning agent has grown bloated — what started as a 10-minute prioritization routine now takes 45 minutes and includes journaling, email triage, calendar review, and three different inboxes. You could trim it back to its core function (evolution), or you could retire it entirely and build a new agent from scratch that handles planning in a fundamentally different way — say, a single question ('What is the one thing that makes everything else easier?') instead of a multi-step process. The right answer depends on whether the agent's core architecture is still sound or whether it has drifted beyond repair.

This concept is part of Phase 30 (Agent Lifecycle) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for agent lifecycle.