Ow. I would hate that: the notion of having an IDE mung my code is nothing compared to the notion of having that munging depend on history, rather than the state of the code.

But that's me. I'd rather attack my code with a penknife than run it through a nanoassembler. If I need more complicated changes, I'll script them myself. (It helps to stick to high-level languages where small text changes can have large effects. The strategy is less useful in languages like Java, which lack metaprogramming and first-order functions.)