How do you use development templates to automate and streamline workflows?

Quick answer: development templates are pre-built infrastructure/pipeline scaffolding a team can reuse instead of writing it from scratch for every new project — a developer starts a new project from a template, follows documented self-service steps to deploy it, and the CI/CD pipeline behind it builds and tests it automatically, removing repetitive setup work and cognitive load from every new project.

These are the templates people can use to have the infrastructure running, so that when they deploy stuff they haven't got to write it themselves — they can just use the templates on their machine or the shared architecture, because there's no doubt a Jenkins server lying about somewhere, and build stuff with the basic scripts and templates.

The advanced level is the full developer portal with comprehensive automation — everything you could possibly imagine is automated. Create a repo on GitLab? Yep, that's automated, you click a button and that repo is already prepopulated with the template. Everything can be automated to the point where developers just get their code, do the developing, and commit it — on the commit it automatically gets built, and after the commit they get a button asking where they want it deployed. An internal developer platform isn't just a tool, though.