"But take a closer look, and you'll see that the time is simply being moved around."
No, it's not. Manual effort is being automated. That manual effort includes calling to remembrance a list of gems, looking up their installation instructions on GitHub, modifying views, editing initializers, converting ERB files to Haml, setting up your test environment just so, and whatever else floats your boat. Assuming a team can agree on some sensible defaults, it can save significant amounts of time to have all those steps automated each time you want to spin up a new project.
"The technical and social friction in changing the template discourages evolution."
No, it doesn't. There is nothing stopping me from deviating from the norm once the application is generated. Or if I need to preempt a step in the generator, I just 'gem unpack' the generator, make my tweak, 'rake install', and generate from that. If it works out, I can push the change up in a branch and submit a pull request. The team can discuss.
Automation is good. From a business perspective I believe it's codifying your expertise. Clients benefit from that automation, because you spend 10 minutes spinning up their project instead of 2-8 hours recreating pretty much the same wheel you created last month.
I think, essentially, he is saying that you end up spending time maintaining your template, losing much of the benefit of the template, depending on how often you start new apps. I have found this to be true at a certain threshold of complication in the app template. However, if you are indeed starting a brand new Rails app every month, as you said, you likely don't have the same cost, as maintenance to the app template happens on a more regular basis. Even as a consultant, I don't start new Rails apps that often, and side projects tend to involve experimentation outside of what I might consider my "stable" stack.
> you end up spending time maintaining your template, losing much of the benefit of the template
It really depends on whether or not you start a lot of new projects. If you're a Rails dev shop that does a wide variety of apps on a regular basis, then the N=1 cost of maintaining the template is well worth the per-project getting-started cost.
No, it's not. Manual effort is being automated. That manual effort includes calling to remembrance a list of gems, looking up their installation instructions on GitHub, modifying views, editing initializers, converting ERB files to Haml, setting up your test environment just so, and whatever else floats your boat. Assuming a team can agree on some sensible defaults, it can save significant amounts of time to have all those steps automated each time you want to spin up a new project.
"The technical and social friction in changing the template discourages evolution."
No, it doesn't. There is nothing stopping me from deviating from the norm once the application is generated. Or if I need to preempt a step in the generator, I just 'gem unpack' the generator, make my tweak, 'rake install', and generate from that. If it works out, I can push the change up in a branch and submit a pull request. The team can discuss.
Automation is good. From a business perspective I believe it's codifying your expertise. Clients benefit from that automation, because you spend 10 minutes spinning up their project instead of 2-8 hours recreating pretty much the same wheel you created last month.