[nicklecompte]

If my subordinate was copying code from StackOverflow without attribution I would be annoyed enough to send a grouchy email. Behavior like that is bad hacker citizenship, and bad for long-term maintenance. You should at least include a hyperlink to the SO question.

I also think SO is different about mindless copy-pasting. Outside of rote beginner stuff it’s infrequent that someone has the exact same question as you, and that the best answer works by simple copy-pasting. Often the modification is simple enough that even GPT can do it :) But making sure the SO question is relevant, and modifying the answer accordingly, is a check on understanding that LLMs don’t really have. In particular, a SO answer might be “wildly wrong” syntactically but essentially correct semantically. LLMs can give you the exact opposite problem.

[fallingknife]

The last time I copied something from SO it was this:

> DENSE_RANK() OVER (ORDER BY TotalMark DESC) AS StudRank

And then I filled in my column names and alias. This is 90% of what is happening with LLMs / SO copying. Copy / paste of syntax like this absolutely does not need a link or attribution and is in no way copyrightable in the first place.

[bayindirh]

This is not 90% of what's happening with LLMs. Everyone I saw using LLMs were requesting whole algorithms or even program boilerplate which doesn't contain much boilerplate but tons of logic.

Case in point: https://x.com/docsparse/status/1581461734665367554

This is not akin to copying a 2-line trick from SO.

On the other hand, the most significant part of code I copied from SO was using two iostream iterators to automatically tokenize an incoming string. 5-6 lines at most.

This block has a 10+ line comment on top of it not only explaining how it works, but it has a link to the original answer at SO.