I agree that work done manually is often sloppy and error prone.
My problem with Anvil IDE is that it’s impossible to make sure that things have the same width and are aligned with manual dragging, and it’s impossible to set the column widths from the IDE. And sometimes it’s difficult to put component X inside component Y when Y is inside Z, because X wants to go inside Z.
In these cases I pull, edit the yaml and push.
Another great tool to improve productivity and form quality are custom components.
The good thing about custom components is that you design them once and reuse them wherever you like.
The bad thing is that they are not WYSIWYG, hence this old feature request.
One more thing that I have used on day one, was to customize our company page template. Since then, every time I create a new app, I clone, copy the theme folder from the template app to the new app and push. At this point the form where I drag the components is different from the default form. I have added some slots and removed others, so I can drag components in those slots and all my apps look identical.
Summary: there are 3 tools (pull-edit yaml-push, custom components, edit template) that allow you to improve productivity and quality while designing your forms. These tools could use some love, but they are very useful as they are.
Said that… I don’t understand why would you want to create editable forms from code. I obviously don’t know your plans, but I have the feeling that if you get familiar with these 3 tools/techniques, you may change your mind. But, as I said, I don’t know your plans.