Also I see so much talk about "boilerplate" I can't help but wonder if people just never had decent text editors, or never bothered to customize them at all?

Aye, I know. Don't get me wrong, I knew that the majority of devs have always been worse than useless, but it's been disconcerting to see quite how much value folk are getting out of agents for problems that have been solved for decades.

Arguably this solution is "better" because you don't even really need to understand that you have specific problems to have the agent solve them for you, but I fail to see the point of keeping these people employed in that case. If you haven't been able to solve your own workflow issues up until now I have zero trust in you being able to solve business problems.

> the majority of devs have always been worse than useless

I disagree with "always".

This is only the recent wave of brogrammers who care nothing about the quality of the tech and are only in this industry for the gold rush.

They aren't inherently technically minded, they just know how to schmooze their way around and convince decision makers to follow capricious trends over solid practices.