[rsynnott]

I always wonder how much damage Stackoverflow did to programmer education, actually. There’s a certain type of programmer who will search for what they want to do, paste the first Stackoverflow answer which looks vaguely related, then the second, and so forth. This is particularly visible when interviewing people.

It is… not a terribly effective approach to programming.

[exe34]

my workflow with stackoverflow is to try to get working code that does the minimum of what I'm trying to do, and only try to understand it after it works as I want it to. otherwise there's an infinite amount of code out there that doesn't work (because of version incompatibility, plain wrong code, etc) and I ran out of patience long ago. if it doesn't run, I don't want to understand it.

[faizshah]

This is in my opinion the right way to use it. You can use stackoverflow or ChatGPT to get to “It works!” But don’t stop there, stop at “It works, and I know why it works and I think this is the best way to do it.” If you just stop at “It works!” You didn’t learn anything and might be unknowingly making new problems.

[username135]

My general philosophy as well.

[noufalibrahim]

I'd qualify that (and the llm situation) with a level of abstraction.

It's one thing to have the llm generate a function call for you where you don't remember all the parameters. That's a low enough abstraction where it serves as a turbo charged doc lookup. It's also probably okay to get a basic setup (toolchain etc. for an ecosystem you're unfamilar with(. But to have it solve entire problems for you especially when you're learning is a disaster.

[underlipton]

Leaning on SO was always the inevitable conclusion, though. "Write once" (however misinterpreted that may be) + age discrimination fearmongering hindering the transfer of knowledge from skilled seniors to juniors + the increasingly brutal competition to secure one's position by producing, producing, producing. With the benefit of the doubt and the willingness to cut/build in slack all dead, of course "learning how to do it right" is a casualty. Something has to give, and if no one's willing to volunteer a sacrifice, the break will happen wherever physically or mechanically convenient.