This would be really useful for programming, particularly refactoring. Imagine being able to quickly apply a relatively mechanical refactoring that still requi

This would be really useful for programming, particularly refactoring. Imagine being able to quickly apply a relatively mechanical refactoring that still required human judgement (pretty common), and have other programmers do it for you. I imagine it would work something like this: - Select the files/directories/blocks of code that you want the refactoring applied to. - Describe (in english) what the refactoring work should be, and do an example on one piece of the code. - The work gets split (by file?) and distributed via a mechanical turk-like interface (extra points if it opens tasks in your favorite editor with syntax highlighting). As workers submit their work, the code is automatically built and tests are run (could be a callback to your local development environment, so you don't have to worry about shipping all your code up to the cloud and figuring out how to build it there). Could be pretty awesome, particularly if you could enlist an army of freshman CS majors, bored programmers, and eager overseas engineers. I wonder if intellectual property concerns would be too high for people to actually use it though. EDIT: If I still worked at Google, this would be a fun project to try internally as 20% project. There are lots of mechanical refactoring tasks that need to be done across large portions of the codebase, good build/test infrastructure to easily verify success/failure for a given task, and lots of bored/eager engineers that feed off of reward-based systems:)