Hacker News Reader

Comment by condensedcrab | Hacker News Reader

I’ve found it very helpful to write out the boilerplate to allow you to write the few lines needed to do what you conceptually want to do.

Also great with figuring a regex pattern in 5-10s instead of getting derailed by SO or Google search.

View on HN

Are there many such lines? People are gripping about boilerplate like they're writing XML by hand or Java with Notepad, but the few actual boilerplate I've seen are easily solved by snippets and code generators. Other things that look like boilerplate are in fact specific code that only fits the current context. And more often you only need to write it once, then either abstract it away or copy-paste it and edit it.

I believe most of these people (including myself) in this context are just talking about boring / obvious / easy code. And yeah, I’d say a large percentage of code changes I do is plumbing for the few interesting ones.

AI handles the boring bits very well, and to me that is the most energetically draining part of coding (the hard parts are fun and invigorating).

Whether it only fits the current codebase’s context or not doesn’t really matter, you just give it important samples from and info about the codebase at the start of your prompt. My baseline prompt length is ~30k tokens due to that.

I do review and polish everything that’s generated though, as needed. Vibe coding (not even reading / understanding the generated code) I believe was coined primarily for having fun in side projects. If you’re using it for production code then you’re likely holding it wrong.

Yeah, the context that comes to mind are basic class methods or simple data cleaning functions for messing with numpy/pandas data

Reply on news.ycombinator.com