I've programmed for decades. Vibe coding is more fun than writing boilerplate just to kick off a small project these days.
The days of:
10 PRINT "Hello World!"; 20 GOTO 10
Are long gone.
The days of:
10 PRINT "Hello World!"; 20 GOTO 10
Are long gone.
So I'm genuinely curious, what sort of things do people who complain about boilerplate ceremonies do?
For me, boilerplate isn't scaffolding out getters and setters, or deferring to templated code generation; using refactoring tools that have been baked into IDEs or third party tools have been available for about 20 years deal with all of those nicely.
On the other hand, the "boilerplate" to stand up a secure web service with appropriate monitoring and scaling capabilities is a fair bit of work when you know that the immediate first users are enterprise businesses.
Building a service that meets or exceeds industry compliance requirements (internal or otherwise) is a lot of work! My harness, skills, and SOPs are set up such that if I spin up a new web-dev project, it gets all of the accessibility, internationalization, observability, authentication and authorization capabilities I would expect, appropriate to the tier. There is a lot of work done to build and implement those at the front end of a project, which I could skip over for experimentation, but for actual, deliverable work, it is a huge accellerator. In addition, by having that scaffolding and boilerplate in place, and a few skills and SOPs to support future feature growth, the agentic coding tools build with them in mind, and wire everything up as they go.
It doesn't replace the need to do the testing and validation, but it sure does break me out of the cycle of "fuck it ship" that takes over when I have my developer hat on, and the "holy shit, burn it all down and start over" that takes over when I put my security engineer hat back on.
shrug YMMV.
giving that code as a prompt to Claude yields:
Worked for 5s · done 8:30 AM
10 PRINT "Hello World"; 20 GOTO 10
Still looping. Anything you'd like me to do for real?
After that, I gave it a second instruction: create a GW-basic interpreter in python
It's 5 characters longer, and gives me the interpreter I need to run the basic code (actually not - I had to change the Basic code to have a second line for the loop in GW-Basic; I should have used a more recent basic, but I actually wrote a GW-Basic interpreter many years ago).