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The fact that most of you didn’t have that before AI is, idk, crazy?

There are shortcuts, snippets, :!ipc, ahk, etc.

It took 25 years of the internet and a whole multi-trillion bubble to provide a boilerplate completion? Seriously? Editing 101. And then you hear “I don’t need Vim/Emacs/etc, I just use zero-config VSCode”. I guess that’s what one gets by not programming their programming environment. Imagine being a programmer and not automating your job for years. Digital Amish style.



Do your snippets write this kind of boilerplate?

https://github.com/williamcotton/webdsl/commit/34862739f6fe9...

I may have tweaked a couple of things in that (and refactored a hell of a lot since) but here's a Python script that I definitely did not write a single line of code:

https://github.com/williamcotton/webdsl/blob/main/tools/gene...

Embedding things into C is nothing new of course but I spent about 45 seconds getting the solution I needed:

https://github.com/williamcotton/webdsl/blob/main/src/server...

All of this is just boilerplate.

I spent most of my mental energies with this project on the grammar, the memory architecture, and fitting all of the pieces together. Cursor and Claude did most of the typing.

Keep in mind I'm iterating over the grammar and making rather large changes in the runtime all the while:

https://github.com/williamcotton/webdsl/commit/54efbb50c2e95...

FWIW, pipelines ended up being implemented like this:

https://github.com/williamcotton/webdsl/blob/main/src/server...

And used in this very simple example like:

  website {
      port 3445
      database "postgresql://localhost/express-test"
      api {
          route "/api/v1/team"
          method "GET"
          pipeline {
              jq { { sqlParams: [.query.id] } }
              sql { SELECT * FROM teams WHERE id = $1 }
              jq { { data: (.data[0].rows | map({id: .id, name: .name})) } }
          }
      }
  }


This is not boilerplate, what are you comparing it with? The root commenter and their replies clearly stated that they use AI for things which they know how to do but too tedious to type. General code generation abilities are out of this scope.


All of that Lua-meets-Jansson setup code is indeed boilerplate!

A python script that embeds data in a "static const char*" is boilerplate!


If you're implying I didn't have anything but edlin levels of manipulation prior to AI you've mistaken what was said. The matter here is "a third way AI is used" not "I had no forms of automation at all until this way to use AI came around". Surely, at some point, you've replaced, upgraded, or improved one of your automation methods in the last several decades as well?

On that note, I certainly wouldn't choose to invest all this money just to get better autocomplete... but whether or not someone else did I'm going to use it where it makes sense for me to.




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