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> Are software engineers really so full of hubris that they thought coding is all that there is to making a product?

Frankly, this barely scratches the surface of the hubris of engineers. I personally think AI has been one of the best thing to happen to software engineering. Writing boilerplate or my millionth auth implementation was never why I fell in love with the craft in the first place.

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We have computers, computers can automate things. Boilerplate is a sign of a bad language (not a bad engineer). But then we add infinite automation features to reduce boilerplate and we get C++, and C++ programmers decry the excessive number of features and want to delete them all and go back to writing boilerplate by hand.

I once wrote a pile of C++ templates that would let you wrap a C++ function as a JavaScript function, automatically converting all the arguments and the return type. Then I left the company. How did my successors find it? No idea. Maybe they pulled out all the automation complexity and replaced it with manually operated boilerplate.

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> Boilerplate is a sign of a bad language

This is true, but I was mostly referring to framework boilerplate (Spring, React, etc.) or plumbing boilerplate. If you've ever written code professionally, you know that most code that you write is just making your thing fit with someone else's thing.

If your consumer or your provider made bad engineering decisions, you have to absorb them. If your company mandates the use of a framework, you have to absorb that, and so on. So I think it's great that AI can write all the dumb shit I didn't come up with anyway.

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> Boilerplate is a sign of a bad language (not a bad engineer).

It's also a sign of refusal to learn an editor or IDE deeply. Most of the ones I know have mechanisms (or plugins) for generating the boilerplate.

Although back to the language, usually the biggest boilerplate killer are macros and so many developers seem to really have a problem with them.

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Spewing out tons of boilerplate has always been the hallmark of a bad engineer.
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What is left? The second-best architecture for any given technical problem is, in the majority of cases, still good enough.
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When all else breaks, absurd() is your friend.

So i guess proven secure architecture will come and stay.

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