>I imagine most experienced web developers have some internal tooling like this too. I don't think that's true at all unless you're talking about 3rd party too

>I imagine most experienced web developers have some internal tooling like this too. I don't think that's true at all unless you're talking about 3rd party tools like rails scaffolding. What languages / frameworks are you using by the way? The boilerplate stuff that can be replaced by scripts is maybe 10-15% of my time anyway. The rest of my time is spent at a much higher level either trying to interpret client requests, trying to help the client decide what they want, making high level design decisions, or adding features that require way to much customization to use automated code generators. This is much different if we're talking about a language like C where a much higher percentage of my time is spent on boilerplate code. However with newer languages and frameworks I think we're reaching diminishing returns for what can be automated by either the language itself or generator scripts/frameworks. There is a huge productivity difference between using C and raw PHP when writing a CRUD app. There's less of a productivity boost (still huge though) when moving from raw PHP to something like Rails. And there's even less of a jump between Rails and something newer like Phoenix. I expect that the next 10 years will give us even smaller incremental improvements.