Don't be clever

At a consulting gig I did, we were bootstrapping a brand new python engineering team for a new line of products. We chose the frameworks, set standards via decision records, wrote a template service that you would copy paste, and build on top. Cross cutting concerns were pulled out into a library that all of these services installed. Most things were standardized, all APIs felt like they were written by a single person, and yet little was abstracted. It was simple and beautiful. An engineer would come onboard, look at one repo and be able to navigate all service repos going forward. You could see and feel the repetition, aside for the business logic, it was like reading the same book over and over again. The team was delivering at a crazy velocity.

Then a year or so later the client brings us back in to help diagnose and fix why their delivery dates continue slipping and number of bugs in production is increasing. Finds out a new, very vocal hire, came in, saw the repetition and decided to build a "service service". A service, into which you would pass a single python file of pure business logic encoded as a b64 string, with some decorators, and it would set up the endpoints, serialization, DB, etc automagically.

I have swung both ways and I think I now settle somewhere near "boring is good" and "repetition is harmless (compared to the astronomic costs of wrong abstraction)".

Especially repetition seems to be hated with the might of a thousand suns and while I get it, because I myself hated it, I now can see the beauty of it.

What is currently a superficial repetition - a bunch of endpoint handlers, some forms - will often turn out to be similar-looking instances of completely different problems. Repetition is quite often deeper than just "code looks the same".

It takes a while to get to know these nuances.

> Yes, I had failed to see the proper solution: a class generator — so that I didn't have to manually copy code again

No, please don't. This is jumping from the frying pan into the fire. If you think abstract base classes can be clever and hard to understand, code generators can be even more so. In addition, because code generators are a one way conversion, and the generated code evolves independently and the code generator itself is evolving independently, you end up with a bunch of things that are subtly different yet somewhat related in a way that you will need an advanced degree in evolutionary biology to understand.

Ah yes, the CrudController to solve all your problems. Also in this list: the AbstractBaseRepository

Found solutions also tend to be super clever. Because they're packaged in a generalized library or white-paper, where the author doesn't have to worry about implementation details.

Clever works great outside of your actual business code.