There's AI slop and anti-AI slop

> I don't feel that wranging cmake, keeping the related documentation up-to-date, adding general command-line options / gui fields and the like terribly creative.

This is simply because CMake is the "assembly" of build systems and no one has figured out a good, higher-level build system yet. (Probably because C/C++ were not designed to be built easily in the first place, so maybe these languages will never have a decent one. I digress)

In any case, asking AI to generate CMake code is a productive[*] but short-term solution. The longer term solution is to have a better, higher-level build system (with or without C/C++). People will still ask AI for help then, but the productivity impact will be much lower, closer to stackoverflow copy/paste.

Generally speaking, whenever coding gets tedious it's because the tools suck (and yes they do).

[*] assuming good quality training data, which looks like a serious challenge with CMake...