[therein]

Since the StackOverflow code was not an identical perfect fit for the problem you had in mind, you still had to have some mental awareness to what you are doing. Now they can just go to Claude and "say I have this solution, and that problem, someone says this should fit into that, what do" and they get the glue inserted without gaining the basic understanding they'd get from putting the glue there themselves.

[Calavar]

Agreed. I'd say there is a ladder to the cognitive aspect of writing code.

1. Constructing an algorithm yourself from first principles, then implementing it. Let's call this "architect level"

2. Reading someone else's description of an algorithm (from a textbook, a blog post, etc.) and implementing it yourself. "Senior dev level"

3. Starting with an existing implementation, treating certain parts of that implementation as a blackbox, but adapting other parts. (e.g. a StackOverflow solution doesn't have a cache, but you need one for performance and add one yourself) "Junior dev level"

4. Copying/pasting with minimal modification. (e.g. ChatGPT gives you a solution that doesn't have a cache. You reprompt it, asking it to add a caching strategy. Your contribution is correcting some names or parameter order and adding some glue code. The main insight you gain here is how to drive ChatGPT, not how the code itself functions.)

Can today's new devs climb from rung 4 to rung 3? If the answer is yes, then maybe nothing has fundamentally changed. If it's a no, then we may be in for trouble 10 to 15 years down the road.

[satvikpendem]

There is a rung 5, using an idea integrated with an LLM agent, like Cursor or Windsurf. It becomes trivially easy to simply prompt it for features or bugs and to tab through the changes it makes to your codebase such that you don't even have to do any copy pasting at all.

[jimbob45]

Came here to say this. It’s rare that you can blindly copy/paste an SO answer. Sometimes it looks like you can but then it doesn’t work and you have to not only carefully read the answer but then also fill in the missing pieces with information elsewhere. Usually, you end up reading 10-30 answers across multiple websites before being able to confidently produce a solution.

Almost always, the instant answers are toolchain-specific, like why my C# DLL isn’t using relative paths in the CSProj file (answer: because different VS versions process DLLs differently).