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> Developers with experience can definitely handle this out but what if a newbie directly starts with the help of AI, he will spend more time on stack overflow

> Developers with experience can definitely handle this out but what if a newbie directly starts with the help of AI, he will spend more time on stack overflow than writing actual code. (oh wait that's how most of the developers are lmao) Spontaneous Ask HN: How much truth is there in this "devs be copy-pasting from SO all day" trope? Personally, I have used SO quite heavily in its early years, circa 2010-2014, including posting my own questions and sometimes posting answers to others' questions. But now, I don't use it actively anymore. Sure, when I search for a concrete question and SO happens to be in the search results, it's sometimes a valuable resource. But it's not the go-to for programming questions that it once was for me. I'm honestly not sure if that's indicative of my own growth as a developer, or caused by outside factors. I have a vague feeling that developer documentation in general got better in the last decade, at least for the technologies that I'm using... but then again it could be also a sign of personal growth that I'm more comfortable with the upstream documentation. Finding answers for webdev questions on MDN is another sort of game than finding answers for webdev questions on SO, after all. What do you all think?

nirui 5y ago
Based on my own experience, I remembered back in the day when I first started programming, in PHP, I copied many code from other commenters on PHP.net a lot (their online manual allows others to post code underneath the main docs). So I expect some new programmers to do the same but with StackOverflow. Of course, I stopped doing that once I got hold on the real knowledge. In fact, now I look back the code that I copied from the others, it's just like watching a horror movie, and I rather rewrite the whole thing in my own term. I guess the fairer statement to put in is "some programmer copy those code to 'get started'".

nirui 5y ago

Based on my own experience, I remembered back in the day when I first started programming, in PHP, I copied many code from other commenters on PHP.net a lot (their online manual allows others to post code underneath the main docs). So I expect some new programmers to do the same but with StackOverflow. Of course, I stopped doing that once I got hold on the real knowledge. In fact, now I look back the code that I copied from the others, it's just like watching a horror movie, and I rather rewrite the whole thing in my own term. I guess the fairer statement to put in is "some programmer copy those code to 'get started'".