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Comment by rimunroe | Hacker News Reader

> 90% of what the average (or median) coder does isn't in any way novel or innovative. It's just API Glue in one form or another.

I hear this from people extolling the virtue of AI a lot, but I have a very hard time believing it. I certainly wouldn't describe 90% of my coding work as boilerplate or API glue. If you're dealing with that volume of boilerplate/glue, isn't it incumbent upon you to try and find a way to remove that? Certainly sometimes it isn't feasible, but that seems like the exception encountered by people working on giant codebases with a very large number of contributors.

I don't think the work I do is innovative or even novel, but it is nuanced in a way I've seen Claude struggle with.

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To be more exact, 90% of the _code_ I write is mostly just different types of API glue. Get data from this system, process it and put it in another system.

It's the connectors that are 90-95% AI chow, just set it to task with a few examples and it'll have a full CRUD interface for your data done while you get more snacks.

Then you can spend _more_ of your limited time on the 10% of code that matters.

That said, less than 50% of my actual time spent on the clock is spent writing code. That's the easiest part of the job. The rest is coordinating and planning and designing.

> To be more exact, 90% of the _code_ I write is mostly just different types of API glue

I assumed you were only talking about the actual code. It still seems really odd. Why is there so much unavoidable boilerplate?

Because I need to have a controller that does CRUD operations.

It has a specific amount of code I need to write just to add the basic boilerplate of receiving the data and returning a result from the endpoint before I can get to the meat of it.

IIRC there are no languages where I can just open an empty file and write "put: <business logic>" and it magically knows how to handle everything correctly.

That's why we have snippets and code generators for those. And even in the absence of that, I usually copy code from some other place and gut it out to make place for the new logic. This can be done in 30 seconds or less if the code is organized.

> IIRC there are no languages where I can just open an empty file and write "put: <business logic>" and it magically knows how to handle everything correctly.

Are you sure it's done correctly? Take something like timestamps, or validations: It's easy to get those wrongs.

Does the "<business logic>" part involve a bunch of irreducible boilerplate too or something? What's it like?

If it doesn't, then I feel like even in the JavaScript world of 2015 you could write "app.put("/mypath", business_logic)" and that would do the trick, and that was a very immature language ecosystem.

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