Laurence TrattOne of the interesting consequences of LLMs/agents is that the short-term costs of boilerplate in code have plummeted. An interesting question is whether those costs are simply shunted to the future or whether they are permanently reduced.
David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)The question is how well an LLM can rewrite boilerplate for new boilerplate when the underlying API changes. Boilerplate is usually bad because it's inflexible: you're making ever user of an API write almost the same thing, rather than giving them an abstraction, which means you're forcing them to provide all of the defaults. When something new requires a default, or when the right choice for a default changes, you require every single consumer of your API to change their code.
From what I've seen of LLMs, they'll be very good at this kind of change in 90+% of the cases and catastrophically (and non-obviously) wrong in the rest.