Every new project starts the same way. Not with the interesting part, not with the problem the client hired you to solve, but with 40 hours of setup.
Configure the CI/CD pipeline. Set up the database migrations. Write the authentication layer. Create the logging infrastructure. Build the health check endpoints. Wire up the monitoring. Configure the linting rules. Set up the test framework. Write the Dockerfile. Create the Kubernetes manifests. Configure the secrets management. Build the deployment scripts.
Forty hours. Sometimes sixty. Before a single line of business logic is written.
This is not engineering. This is ceremony. Every one of these tasks has been solved before, by your own team, on the previous project. But the solutions do not carry forward cleanly. They are entangled with the specifics of the last project, undocumented in ways that matter, and subtly different enough that copy-pasting creates as many problems as it solves.
Boilerworks exists because we got tired of paying this tax on every engagement. It is a developer platform that eliminates the scaffolding phase so that engineering teams can start the real work on day one.
The Problem in Detail
The scaffolding problem is not just about time. It is about the quality of the foundation.
When an engineer sets up a new project under deadline pressure, they make tradeoffs. They skip the structured logging because they will add it later. They use a simple authentication scheme because the real one can come in sprint two. They skip the integration test infrastructure because unit tests are enough for now. They hardcode configuration values because the config management system can wait.
“Later” rarely comes. The project builds momentum, the backlog fills up, and the scaffolding shortcuts become permanent architecture. Six months later, the team is debugging production issues with console.log statements because structured logging never happened. They are managing secrets in environment variables because the secrets management system was never set up. They are running manual deployments because the CI/CD pipeline was configured for the demo and never hardened.
We have seen this pattern across dozens of client engagements over thirteen years. The projects that struggled in production rarely had problems with their core logic. They had problems with the foundation: missing observability, brittle deployments, inadequate testing, and configuration management that was held together with assumptions.
The cost of bad scaffolding is not paid during scaffolding. It is paid continuously, for the life of the project, in slower development, harder debugging, and more frequent production incidents.
What Boilerworks Does
Boilerworks is an opinionated project scaffolding platform. When you start a new project, you describe what you are building, a web API, a background worker, a data pipeline, a frontend application, and Boilerworks generates a complete, production-ready project foundation.
Not a skeleton. Not a starter template with TODO comments. A working project with:
Infrastructure configuration. Terraform modules for the target cloud provider, configured for the project’s requirements. VPC, database, container orchestration, load balancing, DNS, and SSL. All parameterized, all version-controlled, all following the security and operational patterns we have refined over hundreds of deployments.
CI/CD pipeline. A multi-stage pipeline with linting, testing, security scanning, building, and deployment. Configured for the project’s technology stack and deployment target. Not a generic pipeline that needs 20 modifications, a pipeline that works out of the box.
Application scaffolding. The project structure, dependency management, configuration system, logging, error handling, health checks, and metrics endpoints. All following the patterns appropriate for the technology stack, whether that is a Python FastAPI service, a Node.js Express application, a Go microservice, or a React frontend.
Testing infrastructure. Unit test framework configured with coverage reporting. Integration test framework with database fixtures and API test utilities. End-to-end test setup for applications that need it. All wired into the CI pipeline.
Observability. Structured logging that outputs in a format compatible with your log aggregation system. Metrics endpoints that expose application and business metrics. Distributed tracing configured for the service mesh. Alerting rules for the baseline health indicators.
Security baseline. Dependency scanning in the CI pipeline. Secrets detection pre-commit hooks. OWASP-aligned security headers for web applications. Input validation patterns. Authentication and authorization scaffolding appropriate for the project type.
AI integration points. For projects that use AI capabilities, pre-configured integration with CalliopeAI for model management, prompt versioning, and evaluation. This is optional but available, because an increasing number of projects need AI from day one.
Opinionated by Design
Boilerworks is opinionated. It does not ask you whether you want to use structured logging. It sets up structured logging. It does not ask whether you want integration tests. It sets up the integration test framework. It does not ask whether you want security scanning in your CI pipeline. It adds security scanning.
This is a deliberate design decision. The scaffolding phase is not the time for architectural debates about logging frameworks. Those debates consume hours and add no value because the answer, for most projects, is the same. Use structured logging. Use a standard test framework. Use security scanning. These are not controversial decisions. They are table stakes.
The opinions are based on thirteen years of building software for companies ranging from startups to enterprises like Google, Backcountry, and Skullcandy. They represent the patterns that work consistently across different project types, team sizes, and deployment environments. They are the defaults that we would choose for any new project, extracted into automation so that every project gets the benefit without the debate.
This does not mean the opinions are immutable. Boilerworks generates standard code and standard configurations. If the project needs a different logging framework, change it. If the CI pipeline needs an additional stage, add it. The generated foundation is a starting point, not a cage. But it is a starting point that works, which is better than a blank directory that might eventually work.
How It Integrates with AI Workflows
The original version of Boilerworks was pure templating. Define the project parameters, generate the scaffolding, start building. That worked well for five years.
The current version integrates AI at two points in the workflow.
Intelligent project configuration. Instead of selecting options from a menu, you describe what you are building in natural language. “A Python API that processes insurance claims, integrates with a document management system, needs to be HIPAA-compliant, and will handle about 10,000 claims per day.” Boilerworks translates this into project parameters: Python with FastAPI, PostgreSQL with encryption at rest, isolated VPC with no public subnets, audit logging enabled, integration test fixtures for document processing, and infrastructure sized for the expected load.
This does not replace engineering judgment. The generated configuration is a starting point that an engineer reviews and adjusts. But it eliminates the tedious translation from requirements to configuration parameters, which typically takes an hour of checking documentation and making mundane decisions.
Agentic scaffolding for AI-native projects. For projects that use AI agents, such as agentic development with coding assistants, Boilerworks generates additional infrastructure: architectural fitness functions that verify AI-generated code conforms to project patterns, CI pipeline stages optimized for high-volume PR workflows, feedback loop infrastructure that produces machine-readable test results, and quality gates calibrated for agentic commit patterns.
This directly supports the HiVE methodology we use for high-velocity engineering. The scaffolding includes the infrastructure that makes agentic development reliable, not just the infrastructure that makes the application work.
The Economics
The math is straightforward.
A senior engineer’s fully loaded cost is $150 to $250 per hour. Forty hours of scaffolding costs $6,000 to $10,000 per project. If you start ten projects per year, that is $60,000 to $100,000 in scaffolding labor.
But the direct labor cost is the smaller number. The larger cost is the quality gap. Projects that start with incomplete scaffolding accumulate technical debt from day one. That debt compounds. By month six, the project is spending 20 to 30 percent of its engineering budget servicing debt that would not exist if the foundation had been solid.
Over the life of a typical project, the cost of bad scaffolding is three to five times the cost of the scaffolding itself. A $10,000 shortcut in the first week becomes $30,000 to $50,000 in additional engineering cost over 12 months.
Boilerworks eliminates both costs. The scaffolding is done in minutes instead of hours, and it is done correctly because the templates encode the patterns that prevent the most common categories of technical debt.
What It Does Not Do
Boilerworks is a foundation, not a framework. It generates your project’s starting point and then gets out of the way. There is no Boilerworks runtime, no Boilerworks library dependency, no Boilerworks lock-in.
The generated code is yours. It uses standard libraries, standard frameworks, and standard patterns. An engineer who has never heard of Boilerworks can read, modify, and maintain the generated code because it is the same code they would have written, just faster.
Boilerworks does not make architectural decisions for you. It does not decide whether you need a microservice or a monolith, whether to use SQL or NoSQL, or whether to deploy on AWS or GCP. Those are decisions that require understanding your specific context. Boilerworks implements your decisions. It does not make them.
Boilerworks does not write your business logic. It writes everything around your business logic so that you can focus on the part that actually matters: the code that solves the problem you are being paid to solve.
Who It Is For
Boilerworks was built for teams that start projects frequently. If you start one project per year, the scaffolding tax is annoying but manageable. If you start ten projects per year, or if you are an engineering studio that starts new client engagements monthly, the scaffolding tax is a significant drag on capacity and quality.
It is also for teams that want to enforce consistency across projects. When every project starts from the same foundation, the projects share patterns. Engineers can move between projects without relearning the logging system, the test framework, or the deployment process. On-call engineers can respond to incidents on any project because the observability infrastructure is consistent.
We built Boilerworks because we needed it ourselves. Every client engagement at CONFLICT starts a new project, and every project needs the same foundation. The choice was between spending the first week of every engagement on scaffolding or spending it on the problem the client hired us to solve. Boilerworks lets us start solving problems on day one.
The scaffolding phase is not engineering. It is the tax you pay before engineering begins. Boilerworks eliminates the tax. Your engineers start thinking about the problem from the first hour, not the second week. That is the entire value proposition, stated plainly: less time on the parts that do not matter, more time on the parts that do.
