I think a lot of “boilerplate” is just to align with a company’s way of doing things/ecosystem.

In a webpage the UI design, authentication, etc. are all “boilerplate” if one just wants to do “X” instead of worry about infrastructure.

Boilerplate becomes burdensome as complexity increases. Perhaps sometimes we don’t give ourselves enough credit for how much applications and their infrastructure are actually taking care of as part of boilerplate.

I look at stuff like terraform code or AWS infrastructure and it’s annoying and repetitive as hell sometimes but at the same time it’s incredibly impressive that you can just describe something as complex as your own private company’s network existing on global data centers and on a relative level you can just bake in pretty complex stuff like a spiderweb of IAM rules, disaster recovery/backup/databases you barely have to think about, horizontal scaling, security policy and all kinds of other stuff I’m forgetting off the top of my head.

It’s heavy boilerplate because like you said you can basically design an infinitely complex corporation as code and once you’re done with that deploy it instantly which used to be pretty much unheard of.

And yet, many companies today are spinning up full stack teams, asking them to be experts from user interviewing to database design, architecture, hosting, devops, API management, data product, and also keep an eye on GDPR compliance.

I see dozens of teams that are doing cloud to the wazoo when really they need to just be told “we’ll load your routes from main.py, build your assets in /static, you need a DB click the button to provision it”.

It boggles the mind that so many teams are reinventing the wheel a million times over to publish their APIs, register AWS accounts, setup CI, decide on ECS vs Lamda, etc.