> Sometimes it's precisely doing brainless stuff over and over again that becomes hard, like writing a template displaying a table of your results or implementing filter and pagination on a web app.

I always have a hard time taking this complaint seriously, because the solution is absolutely trivial. Write a snippet. Have you really been out there, year after year, rewriting the same shit from scratch over and over? Just make a snippet. Make it good and generic and save it. Whenever you need to do something repeated on a new project, copy it (or auto-expand if you use it that often) and adapt. Snippet managers are a thing.

Or better yet, refactor your app so it doesn't require so much boilerplate - surely if you're doing the same thing over and over again you can just extract it into it's own function / method and abstract over it.