But how to identify common patterns of problems? I think we just need to make an effort to zoom out and consider the phases of software development and infrastructure management we do, then look for similarities.
For example on the web development side, we routinely build web application foundations which require authentication (and less often but also authorization), state storage (database backends), and presentation layers. And yet, unless you start with something like Wordpress, there is little out there which provides a fundamental foundation with modular extensibility.
From a terminal perspective, we manage processes - start/pause/kill, we check states - active network connections, running processes, resource consumption levels, and we do ad-hoc data processing (piped unix commands, but typically in service of one of the previous two categories of needs).
In my work, I commonly use tmux to keep sessions open for different constant needs like psql shell, tail -f of logs, and other routine system management tasks. Most of these could be modules enabled and configured within a management system. I'm sure plenty of other people here have built their own scripts to do exactly this, especially for text or tiled UI systems.
