It's great to help people improve their code, and to think about how advice can be delivered respectfully. It's subtle, but "just" is loaded. I'm sure you've written code under a crazy deadline that could have been better. I can imagine either asking "Is there a reason this isn't in a function?" or saying, "Hm. That could be in a function." I think the difference is that in those cases, you're attempting to understand where the person you're helping is coming from (maybe she is in a hurry and hasn't refactored, maybe she has some cool new grand plan for how the code should work, maybe she didn't notice the code could be reused, or maybe a function actually didn't occur to her), instead of assuming she doesn't know or doesn't care. It is subtle, I agree.