[bandrami]

This conversation keeps missing me because I don't think I've typed out boilerplate in like 20 years.

Were people actually physically typing every character of the software they were writing before a couple of years ago?

[sph]

Interesting. I don’t think my brother has written boilerplate in 20 years either. He’s a chef.

I on the other hand am a software engineer, so writing code is part of the job title.

[bandrami]

Right but, were you really not using snippets and templates before LLMs?

Company? Helm? Whatever vi uses that's like company and helm? Haven't IDEs written function calls for you for like decades now?

[sph]

I very rarely use autocomplete on Emacs, except hippie-expand. I have yasnippet installed but I have never used it. I just checked, it's not even key bound to anything.

I work on greenfield projects so I see my fair share of boilerplate, but honestly, it's just a minute part of work that's almost meditative to write a little bit of trivial code (i.e. a function signature) in between sessions of hard thinking. Writing boilerplate is very far down the list of things I seek to optimize.

Also I don't use LLM.

[danelski]

Couple of years ago I was (as a human being, not my career span) 20. Spare for the usual StackOverflow / blog snippets, that was my experience and I suppose most of those just starting out. I think it's very recent to have fresh grads that barely type code themselves.

[neals]

Yes, I write a lot of things in notepad++ actually, every single character. It really feels like a craft and gives me the same joy as others experience with woodworking or gardening.

[paulryanrogers]

Yes. Until the RSI sets in. Then you learn copy-paste, templating, abstracting and aliases real fast!