In the quest for consistency, platform teams often turn to templating—starter kits, golden paths, boilerplate generators. The goal? Faster onboarding, safer deployments, fewer surprises. The result? A growing zoo of subtly different snowflakes, broken assumptions, and yet another internal tool no one really wants to maintain.

In this episode, we dig into the dark side of templating culture—why efforts to standardize often backfire, and how the dream of "just use the template" slowly erodes into chaos.
We’ll explore:

Why starter kits rarely stay aligned with reality

• How templating introduces a false sense of determinism

• The tension between flexibility and drift
• What happens when every team “tweaks just one thing”
• Whether runtime-aware platforms offer a more durable alternative
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If you've ever cloned the internal boilerplate, spent hours unpicking someone else's one-line deviation, or tried to refactor the "official" template repo that no one owns anymore—this one’s for you.