alt Hacker News> boilerplate
Ruby on Rails and its imitators blew away tons of boilerplate. Despite some hype at the time about a productivity revolution, it didn’t _really_ change that much.
> , libraries, build-tools,
Ensure what you mean by this; what bearing do our friends the magic robots have on these?
> and refactoring
Again, IntelliJ did not really cause a productivity revolution by making refactoring trivial about 20 years ago. Also, refactoring is kind of a solved problem, due to IntelliJ et al; what’s an LLM getting you there that decent deterministic tooling doesn’t?
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And for a lot of AI transformation tasks, for a long time I've been using even clever regex search/replace, and with a few minutes of small adjustment afterward I have a 100% deterministic (or 95% deterministic and 5% manually human reviewed and edited) process for transforming code. Although of course I haven't tried that cross-language, etc.
And of course, we didn't see a massive layoff after the introduction of say, StackOverflow, or DreamWeaver, or jQuery vs raw JS, Twitter Bootstrap, etc.
couldn't have said it better. all of the people clamoring on about eliminating the boilerplate they've been writing + enabling refactoring have had their heads in the sand for the past two decades. so yeah, i'm sure it does seem revolutionary to them!