alt Hacker NewsAs opposed to the old days when people would just blindly copy/paste random shit from Stackoverflow?
Ya'll need to stop with this cope. It's not a good look.
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Once you reach a certain skill level you really didn’t ever visit SO anymore. I basically just live in Postgres, Redis, Ruby and Rails documentation. Still do.
Anyone worth their salt looked down on copy/paste from Stackoverflow, let alone blindly doing so.
Where does this idea come from that good programmers were ever cool with that?
I don't think those two things are comparable, really.
With SO copy/paste, you still were undertaking the mental exercise (and reward) of thinking through hard problems, researching solutions, and assembling it yourself.
With AI, you literally outsource most or all of that. The way some people "vibe code", they barely are engaged with any of that process, if at all.
I think about it like I do video games: it's a lot of fun to play them, and while it can be interesting to watch someone else play, it's just not the same.
I started coding before Stack Overflow existed, and those were the days when coding was most fun for me. Learning HyperCard Basic from the manual that came with the computer was so full of joyful moments.
Stack Overflow had it's heyday, but by the time AI came around I already wasn't using it. Stack Overflow for a long time has been inundated with the kind of people who think everything is the XY problem[1], and arrogantly assume they know what your problem is better than you do. Stack Overflow was all-but-useless for at least 5 years before AI broke into the public eye.
> As opposed to the old days when people would just blindly copy/paste random shit from Stackoverflow?
Many of the people who are complaining about AI vibecoding today also didn't blindly copy/paste from StackOverflow in the past.