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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@david_chisnall I love metaprogramming but you may as well ask why we even still have to write code at all in 2026, given that surely every problem in the field of computer programming has already been solved decades ago
@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
@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.
@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?
@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.
@david_chisnall Boilerplate is a strong indicator that the API is badly designed. "Wizards" even moreso.
@david_chisnall
Agendas...
I suspect somebody is desperate to drown out bad publicity, and/or make their IPO seam better.
@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...