There’s always a balance to be struck when avoiding premature consolidation of repeated code. We all face the same issue as osigurdson at some point and the productive responses fall in a range.

It's funny, but originally I had written a codegenerator that just reads protobuf and generates/modifies code in other parts. It's been ok experience until you hit another corner case (especially in UI part) and need to spend another hours improving codegenerator. But since after AI coding tools became better I started delegating this part to AI increasingly more, and now with agentic AI tools it became way more efficient than keeping maintaining codegenerator. And you're right about DB part - again, now with task description it's a no brainer to tell it which parts shouldn't be touched.