Ya'll need to stop with this cope. It's not a good look.
Many of the people who are complaining about AI vibecoding today also didn't blindly copy/paste from StackOverflow in the past.
Where does this idea come from that good programmers were ever cool with that?
r/programminghumor mostly. It was always tongue in cheek, but people took it too seriously.
However, the number of times I’ve gone over to help a colleague and realized they were trying to copy/paste code from SO, without even reading the context of the thread is baffling. Like, why did you expect it to work in the first place? I really try to be humble and not make assumptions about people competencies but it’s really hard to have those experiences and not think the average programmer is just an idiot. It’s no wonder AI is helping people when this was the baseline.
So if you see an answer on stack overflow, read it, comprehend it, and you can pretty easily mentally verify the correctness to a sufficient degree of confidence…
I guess I’m not worth my salt.
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.
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.