Completely depends on how often you need to write boilerplate code, and how error-prone it is.
After writing hundreds of instances of ‘fetch this from the server and show an error if it doesn’t work’, I finally wrote a helper for that. It took 2 hours, shouts at me if I use it wrong, and instantly makes my classes easier to read because all the boilerplate is gone. As an added bonus, the invocation is so small that Copilot can write it error-free, which it couldn’t before.
So fetching things is now a thing of a few seconds instead of one minute with a chance of making a mistake. I say it’s worth it.
C) Write a highly specific, custom-tailored boilerplate generator that does 80% of the work and needs only a day or two to implement.
D) spend millions developing an AI to generate the boilerplate generator badly
This sounds just extremely dumb to me, as in “do something manually for 2 minutes or spend 2 days automating it”
Also, DRY in 90% of the cases is a sham
DRY, but also pre-optimization and dependency hell are bad.
Completely depends on how often you need to write boilerplate code, and how error-prone it is.
After writing hundreds of instances of ‘fetch this from the server and show an error if it doesn’t work’, I finally wrote a helper for that. It took 2 hours, shouts at me if I use it wrong, and instantly makes my classes easier to read because all the boilerplate is gone. As an added bonus, the invocation is so small that Copilot can write it error-free, which it couldn’t before.
So fetching things is now a thing of a few seconds instead of one minute with a chance of making a mistake. I say it’s worth it.