In the last week, I’ve seen an uptick in ‘AI is good for boilerplate’ posts.
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In the last week, I’ve seen an uptick in ‘AI is good for boilerplate’ posts. It is 2026. Metaprogramming is over 50 years old. Why are we writing boilerplate at all, much less creating expensive tools that let us write more of it faster?
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In the last week, I’ve seen an uptick in ‘AI is good for boilerplate’ posts. It is 2026. Metaprogramming is over 50 years old. Why are we writing boilerplate at all, much less creating expensive tools that let us write more of it faster?
@david_chisnall and me here has been generating boilerplate for decades using small shell scripts, templates and hotkeys. not an unsolved problem. but newbs be newbs...
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In the last week, I’ve seen an uptick in ‘AI is good for boilerplate’ posts. It is 2026. Metaprogramming is over 50 years old. Why are we writing boilerplate at all, much less creating expensive tools that let us write more of it faster?
@david_chisnall
Agendas...I suspect somebody is desperate to drown out bad publicity, and/or make their IPO seam better.
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In the last week, I’ve seen an uptick in ‘AI is good for boilerplate’ posts. It is 2026. Metaprogramming is over 50 years old. Why are we writing boilerplate at all, much less creating expensive tools that let us write more of it faster?
@david_chisnall I've had this conversation so many times with people and it has confused me since day one. Isn't the point of boiler plate to write once and use those same pieces forever? I suspect this actually means that it creates scaffolding when they don't know how to start a project, which to me is more of an indictment on project setup and layout tooling than anything else.
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In the last week, I’ve seen an uptick in ‘AI is good for boilerplate’ posts. It is 2026. Metaprogramming is over 50 years old. Why are we writing boilerplate at all, much less creating expensive tools that let us write more of it faster?
@david_chisnall The exact meaning of "boilerplate" in these discussions is unclear to me.
Are we talking about the sort of common cross-project tasks that libraries (our own or other people's) can be brought in to solve? E.g. reading and validating a config file, handling HTTP requests, playing audio.
Or, is it the sort of smaller utility functions we all end up writing/copying into every project? Formatting a duration, pluralising some text.
Is it both, or something else entirely? Are these in fact the same?
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@david_chisnall The exact meaning of "boilerplate" in these discussions is unclear to me.
Are we talking about the sort of common cross-project tasks that libraries (our own or other people's) can be brought in to solve? E.g. reading and validating a config file, handling HTTP requests, playing audio.
Or, is it the sort of smaller utility functions we all end up writing/copying into every project? Formatting a duration, pluralising some text.
Is it both, or something else entirely? Are these in fact the same?
@jscholes I think it is both? LLMs are good at translating. You can tell them „look at this function and struct, now make a vector cross product function that works with the datatypes you just saw.“ and it will work well. Replace cross product with some other not-too-complex function that the LLM has seen in a different language and/or with different datatypes. It will be able to „translate“ the structure of the code into the new requirements.
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@david_chisnall The exact meaning of "boilerplate" in these discussions is unclear to me.
Are we talking about the sort of common cross-project tasks that libraries (our own or other people's) can be brought in to solve? E.g. reading and validating a config file, handling HTTP requests, playing audio.
Or, is it the sort of smaller utility functions we all end up writing/copying into every project? Formatting a duration, pluralising some text.
Is it both, or something else entirely? Are these in fact the same?
@jscholes @david_chisnall Much of the boilerplate I've seen - stamped out with only a small difference - is where you are exposing a data model in a web app. You have a requirement which needs a new field, and so you need a new column in the db, a new field in the DTO, maybe a new constraint in the update command, a new field in the typescript, a new widget in the UI. I tend to use one representation as the primary and templates to generate the rest, but that is not very fashionable right now.
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In the last week, I’ve seen an uptick in ‘AI is good for boilerplate’ posts. It is 2026. Metaprogramming is over 50 years old. Why are we writing boilerplate at all, much less creating expensive tools that let us write more of it faster?
@david_chisnall Many people I've worked with were excited about the possibility "AI" would make mash-ups of apps so much easier. You just get an "agent" to go through the UI of apps in the background, and complete tasks for you, instead of having to figure out how to drive each of these APIs.
But this is software engineering *failure*. The problem is shitty APIs, and if you go down this path, you're never writing good APIs—only documentation for your shitty "agents" to infer actions from.
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In the last week, I’ve seen an uptick in ‘AI is good for boilerplate’ posts. It is 2026. Metaprogramming is over 50 years old. Why are we writing boilerplate at all, much less creating expensive tools that let us write more of it faster?
@david_chisnall From time to time, I use it to reduce boilerplate. I don't respect, say, bash enough to truly desire to learn more about it. Enough has been said about their limitations elsewhere. I have better things to do than code-golfing bash, but I want the result - my bash to be terse.
Never point LLMs at things you love. I don't love nix the language or C++17 and I never will
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In the last week, I’ve seen an uptick in ‘AI is good for boilerplate’ posts. It is 2026. Metaprogramming is over 50 years old. Why are we writing boilerplate at all, much less creating expensive tools that let us write more of it faster?
@david_chisnall I want emacs macros for every AST. I want the power of a refactoring browser for every language.
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