Oct 23, 2026, 2:48 PM“It’s good for boilerplate”, my god _who cares_. What else are we all rebuilding or recreating over and over again because we’re doing it alone. What should be part of a new standard library, a standard datatype or utility, a new primitive hiding in plain sight.
Oct 23, 2026, 3:11 PMOur toolchains are unidirectional, and the result of that has been that our entire global exercise in large stochastic models is running _exactly backwards_.
Write code. Compile, get errors. Manually go back to edit text. Fix, compile again. Loop N times. Compile successfully, run tests. See failure. Go back to text. Edit text. Loop N times.
The Rust folks are so close. "Did you mean...." Yes, I did, just... edit the text and retry! "Warning, Implicit cast to" Great, make it explicit!
Oct 23, 2026, 3:19 PMEvery step in the development process in which information is gained should be able to drive changes back into the text of the program _through the automation_.
"Unknown variable, did you mean?" Yes, sure, click. But bring the compiler into the game. "This function will be inlined by the compiler. Inline the text for legibility?" Yes, please.
But stochastic models? "This code resembles [library]". This code has few side effects, and might be made fully functional [list of side effects]."
Oct 23, 2026, 3:21 PMWe could have assistive technology for sharpening, simplifying and clarifying our thinking. Not just generating a tsunami of things we have to think but wish we didn't, instead. We could have that.
Every line of boilerplate in this world is a tiny monument to laziness and negligence.
Every line of slop code in this world is a tombstone for someone's cognitive ambitions.
@mhoye they are so good at complex text categorizing tasks!! So good!
Oct 23, 2026, 2:59 PM@mhoye i'm not sure what you're saying here. ime, "boilerplate" is the stuff that can't be excised, like "#include <stdio.h>" before using "printf", or rust's type annotations for constants. these things can't really be removed because of the language's own requirements.
i'm not arguing we should use genai for that. if anything, the use of genai subverts the reasons why those requirements exist, but at the same time, we have all complained about this for decades for a reason: it's extremely hard to be rid of.
some languages just have less need for it than others, but those also come with trade-offs that you don't necessarily want.
Oct 23, 2026, 3:03 PM@mhoye see also: hedy¹, a pedagogical language that starts as no boilerplate, but turns into full python as your requirements change and your understanding grows.
@mhoye You know the best tool for boilerplate?
Ctrl+c, Ctrl+v.
The point of boilerplate text is you know it works reliably so you can reuse it over and over again, usually with no changes, otherwise with minimal customisations.
Boilerplate should never be riddled with AI slop and errors.
@mhoye with respect, I think that in many cases what's being monumented is "nobody was willing to give someone knowledgeable the support they needed to focus on this". I think of it the same way I think about security bugs: sometimes it's carelessness or ignorance, but sometimes it's "I'm really tired of doing this for free *and* being yelled at".
Oct 23, 2026, 3:32 PM@gvwilson There's definitely a cycle of violence in play here, with deep roots in shoddy metrics like "lines of code" and "dollars"
@gvwilson @mhoye This feels right to me.
My primary interface to code in my day job is mediated entirely by a shoggoth. The hundreds of thousands of lines of code I work to sustain was mostly written manually five to ten years ago by startup rats who never had time to focus on any time horizon longer than a few weeks. These days, the time horizons are just as short and the codebase now is simply unmaintainable without the assistance of shoggoths.
However, in my hobby projects, which will never be published anywhere, and I can focus without any time horizon pressing on me, I am finding the shoggoths to be a real help with toilsome behind the scenes tasks.
There is a real missed opportunity here due to the usual misrule that can be attributed to management school brain rot and the moral decay of American-style late-stage capitalism.
Tend your gardens, and persevere as if these are the early days of a better world.
@mhoye https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzGbpODFmUY is stuck in my head a lot lately for some reason.
I prefer to believe that our code writing processes are a microcosm of societal thought at large. Are our societies caught up in Freudian death drive, such that unconsciously most people want their own death and the death of others? Yes. That's clear from our environmental policies so why shouldn't it be clear that our code is designed towards death as well?
Oct 23, 2026, 3:12 PM@mhoye It's just supercharging what was already there. Over the past *mumble* decades I've lost track of how many "but that wasn't invented here, it will never work for us" discussions I've sat through.
Now with AI, we don't need to have the discussion.
"Good for boilerplate" is faint praise indeed.
The whole point of boiler plate is that it is trivial to repeat it.
Oct 24, 2026, 9:27 PM@mhoye "i have decided to join the war on boilerplate on the side of the boilerplate"
Oct 24, 2026, 10:01 PM@mcc counts to my LOC quota, so it must mean I’m productive.