>Writing java with emacs or vi is a materially different experience than using eclipse or idea and var style type-inference seems almost silly with those tools which do it for you.

It's not so much the extra typing that's the problem, it's the extra reading. All the stuttering is visual noise.

This. If you want to revolutionize the profession, come up with something that helps with reading as much as modern IDEs help with writing. My answer is that boilerplate should be generated somewhere else and largely ignored.

IMO, boilerplate source code shouldn’t be generated at all — the tool chain should directly emit the required object code. And code generation shouldn’t require a different language — or special comment syntax.

Depends on the toolchain. Everybody knows how to generate ugly source files, but it takes more effort to add AST nodes during compilation (or symbol table entries with types plus object code) and might lead to errors nobody understands how to fix (because you can't read the declaration of the thing you're trying to interact with).