Be Aware of the Makefile Effect

I have made conscious effort in the past to never copy/paste the initial fleshing-out of a Makefile or a PHP class, or HTML boilerplate, or whatever. Like, for years I stuck to that. Then I stopped making that effort because there is no upside. Or rather, there is no downside to copy+paste+modify. It's faster and you save your brain power for things that actually matter.

There's a subtle difference between a nice template and a fully-working implementation that you then modify though.

(e.g. in that they were designed with different goals in mind, so the former is likely to have stopped at the point where it was general enough, to save you time, but not too specific to create footguns).

Bonus points if your template explicitly has fail patterns that prevent your code from silently failing.