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Comment by stavros | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, exactly the same for me. It's tiring writing the same CRUD endpoints a thousand times, but that's how useful products are made.

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I wonder why it’s not the norm to use code generation or some other form of meta programming to handle this boring repetitive work?

Because, like a carpenter doesn't always make the same table, but can be tired of always making tables, I don't always write the exact same CRUD endpoints, but am tired of always writing CRUD endpoints.

I think your analogy shows why LLMs are useful, despite being kinda bad. We need some programming tool to which we can say, "like this CRUD endpoint, but different in this and that". Our other metaprogramming tools cannot do that, but LLMs kinda can.

I think now we have identified this problem (programmers need more abstract metaprogramming tools) and a sort of practical engineering solution (train LLM on code), it's time for researchers (in the nascent field of metaprogramming, aka applied logic) to recognize this and create some useful theories, that will help to guide this.

In my opinion, it should lead to adoption of richer (more modal and more fuzzy) logics in metaprogramming (aside from just typed lambda calculus on which our current programming languages are based). That way, we will be able to express and handle uncertainty (e.g. have a model of what constitutes a CRUD endpoint in an application) in a controlled and consistent way.

This is similar how programming is evolving from imperative with crude types into something more declarative with richer types. (Roughly, types are the specification and the code is the solution.) With a good set of fuzzy type primitives, it would be possible to define a type of "CRUD endpoint", and then answer the question if the given program has that type.

Leaky abstractions. Lots of meta programming frameworks tried to do this over the years (take out as much crud as possible) but it always ends up that there is some edge case your unique program needs that isn’t handled and then it is a mess to try to hack the meta programming aspects to add what you need. Think of all the hundreds of frameworks that try to add an automatic REST API to a database table, but then you need permissions, domain specific logic, special views, etc, etc. and it ends up just easier to write it yourself.

If you can imagine an evolutionary function of noabstraction -> total abstraction oscilating overtime, the current batch of frameworks like Django and others are roughly the local maxima that was settled on. Enough to do what you need, but doesn’t do too much so its easy to customize to your use case.

Because in practice the API endpoint isn't what takes up the time or LOC, but what's underneath. In fact, there's plenty of solutions to e.g. expose your database / data storage through an API directly. But that's rarely what you really want.

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