Why I Delegated My Boilerplate to an AI Agent

Two years ago I spent forty percent of my day writing code I could recite from memory. CRUD endpoints. Form validation. Migration files. Test scaffolding. Configuration objects. The same patterns, different domain, eight hours of typing what a machine could produce in seconds.

I built Hermes because I got tired of being a typist.

The first version did one thing: generate boilerplate from templates I defined. I'd describe a new API endpoint, and Hermes produced the route handler, the input validation schema, the database query, the error responses, and the test file. All of it. In under ten seconds.

That saved me two hours per feature. Good start. But the interesting shift happened when I started trusting the agent with judgment calls, not just pattern filling.

From Templates to Autonomous Execution

Now Hermes runs on a cron schedule. Three times a day, it checks my backlog, picks a task, writes the code, generates the tests, opens a pull request, and sends me a summary. I review. I approve or request changes. The entire loop from idea to running in production compresses from a day to an hour.

The trade-off here is control. I give up line-by-line involvement in return for throughput.

Quality Went Up, Not Down

What I've found after running this system for months is that my code quality improved. Hermes does not skip validation because it's tired. It does not copy a pattern from Stack Overflow and forget to change the error message. It follows the conventions I defined. No shortcuts, no drift.

Three patterns account for most of what Hermes generates in my projects: API scaffolding, blog content, and DevOps configuration.

When Delegation Makes Sense

The people who benefit most from this setup are not junior developers looking for a shortcut. They are senior engineers whose time costs more than the compute that runs the agent.

Architecture is about trade-offs, not silver bullets. I traded fine-grained control over boilerplate for time spent on problems that require human judgment. That trade works for me.