Because it is a StackOverflow blog post its a bit self-serving, but basically it appears to advocate creating a permanent intangible dependency on StackOverflow

Because it is a StackOverflow blog post its a bit self-serving, but basically it appears to advocate creating a permanent intangible dependency on StackOverflow to your ability to program. Those heavily invested into StackOverflow means it becomes part of their programming identity, and as a result it skews their perspective of what they decide programming should be (which is true for them themselves). The virtual-connectedness we have as programmers now has changed/accelerated (and perhaps thus slowed) the way programming is done. To be fair cut and paste programming has been around pre-Stack Overflow and even pre-WWW - it just required enough programmers and code-base to be in the one location for it to become viable. As the web ages, like a sprawling codebase not rigorously maintained, the amount of cruft it acquires over time goes up - where a lot of stuff that is no longer used or out of date or just plain wrong yet still there comes up in your search. It makes me think a lot of signal vs noise and worse still false signal vs noise comparisons. Sometimes you can find years later after you did something that you solved the problem the old/should be obsolete way, or you did the almost-the-right thing but not the right thing - often at a time/place you can't go back and correct/amend your previous code, not least because you're not meant to be working on it anymore even if you're with the same employer.