Why I Stopped Using AI for Boilerplate (and What I Use It For Instead)

Hot take: the worst use of AI coding assistants is the thing most people use them for — generating boilerplate. I spent three months auto-generating CRUD endpoints, form components, and config files. I felt productive. My git log was full of big commits. Then I looked at what I actually shipped, and I realized I'd been optimizing the wrong thing. The Boilerplate Trap Here's what happens when you use AI for boilerplate: You prompt: "Generate a CRUD API for users with Express and Prisma" AI spits out 200 lines of working code You glance at it, looks fine, commit A week later, you find three inconsistencies with your existing endpoints You spend an hour fixing patterns the AI didn't know about The problem isn't that AI generates bad boilerplate. It's that boilerplate is the part of your codebase where consistency matters most — and AI is terrible at consistency unless you over-specify every detail. You know what's great at consistent boilerplate? A template. A snippet. A plop generator. A