In JS at least, there's a concept of truthiness and falsiness. 0, undefined, null, and a few other non-boolean values are treated as false if used in conditionals and logical operations, while every other value is treated as true. I'm pretty sure python has something similar.
But the real savings? Repetitive code. I suck at it, I always make typos and it’s draining.
It's hard to say without being immersed in the codebase you work on, but wouldn't making your code DRY (when possible) take care of a lot of the repetition without needing to write a bunch of incredibly similar code (be it by hand or with an LLM)?
MDN offers webdev tutorials. While I've never tried their tutorials out, the MDN docs are really good and they're my go to when I need to figure out how a specific brower-side API works.
Yeesh, I thought you were being hyperbolic, but it really is that bad! He even has this massive self report towards the end:
And how do you avoid being punished? There are two ways. One that works; and one that doesn’t. The one that doesn’t work is to design everything up front before coding. The one that does avoid the punishment is to override all the safeties.
And so you will declare all your classes and all your functions open. You will never use exceptions. And you will get used to using lots and lots of ! characters to override the null checks and allow NPEs to rampage through your systems.
Uncle Bob must be the kind of guy who makes all of his types any when writing Typescript.
Anslopic