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Comment by voidUpdate | Hacker News Reader

> The rest is boiler plate, cargo-culted, Dockerfile, build system and bash environment variable passing

I keep seeing people saying to use an LLM to write boilerplate, but like... do you not just copy that from another project where you already wrote it?

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No, because it's usually a few years old and already obsolete - the frameworks and the language have gone through a gazillion changes and what you did in 2021 suddenly no longer works at all.

I mean, the training data also has a cutoff date and changed beyond that are not reflected in the code suggestions.

Also, I know that people love to joke on modern software and JS in particular. But if you take react code from 2020 and drop it into a new react codebase it still works. Even class based components work. Yes, if you jumped on the newest framework bandwagon every time stuff will break all the time, but AI won’t be able to help you with that either. If you went for relatively stable frameworks, you can re use boilerplate completely or with relatively minimal adjustments

React is alright but the framework tooling around it changes a lot.

If you take a project from 2020 it's a bit of a pain to upgrade it.

True. But LLMs have access to the web. I’ve told ChatGPT plenty of times to verify an SDK API or if I knew the API was new, I just gave it a link to the documentation. This was mostly around various AWS SDKs

The search improvements to o3 and o4-mini have made a huge difference in the last couple of weeks.

I ran this prompt (and others like it) and it actually worked!

  This code needs to be upgraded to the new
  recommended JavaScript library from
  Google. Figure out what that is and
  then look up enough documentation to
  port this code to it

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/18/gemini-image-segmentat...

lol, I've been cutting and pasting from the same projects I started in 2010. When you work in vanilla js it doesn't change.

Ehh most people are good about at least throwing a warning before they break a legacy pattern. And you can also just use old versions of your tools. I'm sure the 2021 tool still does the job. Most people aren't working on the bleeding edge here. Old versions of numpy are fine.

I keep seeing that suggestion as well and the only sensible way I see would be to use one off boilerplate, anything else does not make sense.

If you keep re-using boilerplate once in a while copying it from elsewhere is fine. If you re-use it all the time, just get a macro setup in your editor of choice. IMHO that is way more efficient than asking AI to produce somewhat consistent boilerplate

You know. I have my boilerplate in Rails and it is just a work of art... I simply clone my BP repo, bundle, migrate, run and I have user management, auth, smtp client, sms alerts, and literally everything I need to get started. And it was just this same week I decided to try a code assistant, and my result was shockingly good, once you provide the assistant with a good clean starting point, and if you are very clear on what you want to build, then the results are just too good to be dismissed.

So yes, boilerplate, but also yes, there is definitely something to be gained from using ai assistants.

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