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0 pointsendemic1y ago0 comments

I feel like we should get rid of the boilerplate, rather than have an LLM barf it out.

0 comments

There's an inherent tradeoff here though. Beyond a certain complexity threshold, code that leans toward more boilerplate is generally much easier to understand and maintain than code that tries to DRY everything with layers of abstraction, indirection, and magic.

lowbloodsugar1y ago

When I try to read code on GitHub that has the var or val keyword, I have no fucking idea what the types of the variables are. Sure, the compiler can infer, since it’s just ingested your entire code base, but I have a single page of text to look at.

Some boilerplate is good.

JohnFen1y ago

Honestly, this bit about genAI being good at generating boilerplate is correct, but it always makes me wonder... is this really a thing that would save a ton of time? How much boilerplate are people writing? Only a small fraction of code that I write involves boilerplate.

tisdadd1y ago

I just tend to use am extension such as https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Huuums.v... for my boilerplate, as I can customize along the way for the project and not think hard. I have seen a lot of younger devs not using such a thing or already existing CLI and instead copy paste then rename, or try writing from scratch every time but slight differences... It is weird to me how many don't look for ways to automate boilerplate, as it has always been my default.

Terr_1y ago

Yeah, I often like to point out that our entire industry is already built on taking repeatable stuff and then abstracting it away.

Boilerplate code exists when the next step is often to start customizing it in a unique and unpredictable way.

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