this is a draft of a blogpost that i'll be posting somewhere. Feedback welcome! also feel free to ping me on twitter
I've recently been working on some CLI that involves printing out a bunch of boilerplate template code for developer convenience. I found that there were a few interesting DX angles to this and figured I should write down the rough problem areas and the stances I chose. Most of us are familiar with CLIs like https://yeoman.io/, this task is variously called "scaffolding" or "templating" or some such similar term, with varying degrees of intelligence in the task. I'll refer to it as "templating" in this essay.