Ask HN: What's the best way to create and maintain a blueprint for my projects?

I haven't done Rails in years, but I miss the generators and scaffolding. It was a great way to get started on a project quickly, and although we're now more apprehensive about "frameworks vs. libraries", some big projects like React agree dev on-boarding is an issue. I value explicitness, but think there's a lot of opportunity for convention over coding.

I feel generators like Yeoman are too opinionated, clunky, get outdated quickly, and also separate from the codebase. Git-cloneable starters and boilerplates have similar issues.

I'd much rather have a "blueprint" file similar to the DevOps world. I can clone popular ones, reuse components to make my own, and whenever I want to add some new feature to my project I just change my blueprint and it would create a todo list of changes I need to make (I don't know if i completely trust automated manipulation of generated-then-altered code, but it could definitely have code generation the first time). It could even turn into a Git Flow-like development process. Something like TDD or unidirectional project changes: change your blueprint, before you make major/minor (non-patch) changes to your code.

If implemented in something like YAML with a package system like NPM, your blueprint could refer to vendor blueprints and then if you upgrade your vendor blueprint the same "diff todo" above could tell you what you need to change to implement the new version.

Hopefully someone can point me to a tool that acts like this, or explain to me if I'm being too naive to the complexity with such a simple example, or missing something else altogether.

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