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Comment by kypro | Hacker News Reader

Surely you don't find writing boilerplate fun though?

Coding agents still give you control (at least for now), but are like having really good autocomplete. Instead of using copilot to complete a line or two, using something like Cursor you can generate a whole function or class based on your spec then you can refine and tweak the more nuanced and important bits where necessary.

For example, I was doing some UI stuff the other day and in the past it would have taken a while just to get a basic page layout together when you're writing it yourself, but with a coding assistant I generated a basic page asking it to use an image mock up, a component library and some other pages as references. Then I could get on and do the fun bits of building the more novel parts of the UI.

I mean if it's code you're working on for fun then work however you like, but I don't know why someone would employ a dev working in such an inefficient way in 2025.

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You can generate boilerplate without AI and whenever there's a significant amount of boilerplate needed there should be a (non-AI) generation tool to go with it. Deterministic code generation is a lot easier to have confidence in than LLM output.

>I don't know why someone would employ a dev working in such an inefficient way in 2025.

It amazes me how fast the hype has taken off. There is no credible evidence that, for experienced devs, working with AI coding tools makes you significantly more productive.

Many devs say they are more productive now. That's the "evidence".

Devs (like yourself) might generate scaffolding for a greenfield project very quickly and be amazed and claim they're more productive, but I don't think that is evidence that an experienced developer will actually be more productive.

Honestly, project scaffolding is such a small part of the job. I spend a lot more time reading, designing, thinking critically about, reviewing changes to, and generally maintaining code than I do creating greenfield projects or writing boilerplate. For all of these tasks having actually written the code myself gives me an advantage. I don't believe today's tools are a net positive.

> Surely you don't find writing boilerplate fun though?

Of course. So if I'm faced with some boilerplate, I try to refactor it away so it's less boilerplatey. Perhaps I'm lucky but mostly this seems to work, I don't often find myself writing boilerplate.

> I don't know why someone would employ a dev working in such an inefficient way in 2025

Am I working inefficiently? I'm not sure. How much time does the typing part of programming actually take up? I guess it varies, but it's definitely less than 50% for me. Thinking/designing/communicating/listening take most of my time. The typing part is not a bottleneck.

> Surely you don't find writing boilerplate fun though?

The majority of the code I write is not boilerplate, and writing the boilerplate myself is useful to me.

> Coding agents still give you control (at least for now), but are like having really good autocomplete.

And I think that's the problem. I think autocomplete itself is a bad thing. If one has autocomplete, one is more likely to type stuff that is less valuable to be typed.

> Surely you don't find writing boilerplate fun though

No, but I don't find debugging the LLM boilerplate that is at best 50-80% correct very fun either

I have better ways to automate boilerplate than using LLMs

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