I haven&#x27;t done Rails in years, but I miss the generators and scaffolding. It was a great way to get started on a project quickly, and although we&#x27;re now more apprehensive about &quot;frameworks vs. libraries&quot;, some big projects like React agree dev on-boarding is an issue. I value explicitness, but think there&#x27;s a lot of opportunity for convention over coding.<p>I feel generators like Yeoman are <i></i>too<i></i> opinionated, clunky, get outdated quickly, and also separate from the codebase. Git-cloneable starters and boilerplates have similar issues.<p>I&#x27;d much rather have a &quot;blueprint&quot; file similar to the DevOps world. I can clone popular ones, reuse components to make my own, and whenever I want to add some new feature to my project I just change my blueprint and it would create a todo list of changes I need to make (I don&#x27;t know if i completely trust automated manipulation of generated-then-altered code, but it could definitely have code generation the first time). It could even turn into a Git Flow-like development process. Something <i>like</i> TDD or unidirectional project changes: change your blueprint, before you make major&#x2F;minor (non-patch) changes to your code.<p>If implemented in something like YAML with a package system like NPM, your blueprint could refer to vendor blueprints and then if you upgrade your vendor blueprint the same &quot;diff todo&quot; above could tell you what you need to change to implement the new version.<p>Hopefully someone can point me to a tool that acts like this, or explain to me if I&#x27;m being too naive to the complexity with such a simple example, or missing something else altogether.<p>x-post from &#x2F;r&#x2F;learnprogramming: 
https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;learnprogramming&#x2F;comments&#x2F;4769ee&#x2F;whats_the_best_way_to_create_and_maintain_a&#x2F;
Ask HN: What's the best way to create and maintain a blueprint for my projects?