"I don't want to have to write this for the umpteenth time" -- Don't let it even reach a -teenth. Automate it on the 2nd iteration. Or even the 1st if you know you'll need it again. LLMs can help with this.

Software engineers are lazy. The good ones are, anyway.

LLMs are extremely dangerous for us because it can easily become a "be lazy button". Press it whenever you want and get that dopamine hit -- you don't even have to dive into the weeds and get dirty!

There's a fine line between "smart autocomplete" and "be lazy button". Use it to generate a boilerplate class, sure. But save some tokens and fill that class in yourself. Especially if you don't want to (at your own discretion; deadlines are a thing). But get back in those weeds, get dirty, remember the pain.

We need to constantly remind ourselves of what we are doing and why we are doing it. Failing that, we forget the how, and eventually even the why. We become the reverse centaur.

And I don't think LLMs are the next layer of abstraction -- if anything, they're preventing it. But I think LLMs can help build that next layer... it just won't look anything like the weekly "here's the greatest `.claude/.skills/AGENTS.md` setup".

If you have to write a ton of boilerplate code, then abstract away the boilerplate in code (nondeterminism is so 2025). And then reuse that abstraction. Make it robust and thoroughly tested. Put it on github. Let others join in on the fun. Iterate on it. Improve it. Maybe it'll become part of the layers of abstraction for the next generation.