To clarify, I mean writing scripts that generate or modify classes for you instead of manually writing them every time, for example if you want to replace reflection with a ton of verbose repetitive code for performance reasons I guess?
My only experience with this is just plain old manual txt generation with something like python, and maintaining legacy t4/tt VS files but those are kind of a nightmare.
What’s a good modern way of accomplishing this, have there been any improvements in this area?
Um… what rock have you been living under?
For simple code generation, I use GitHub CoPilot.
In both cases, I’m essentially writing the code “from scratch” myself every time, but now I can type “write a person class” then “add a name property”, etc. Best of both words - the control of hand written code, and the efficiency of not having to type all that code out.
When your code is really repetitive, you don’t even need to give it any prompts at all. You can usually just start a new empty line and it will guess what line goes there. For example if you have a firstName property, it will predict you’re about to add lastName.
When it’s more complex, for example if I haven’t figured out how to structure the code yet, I use ChatGPT+. That’s more of a conversation approach, similar to bouncing ideas off a colleague… “how would you do this; what about that edge case; etc”.