[omoikane]

Before StackOverflow, we copied stuff from physically printed material. My personal favorite is the Perl Cookbook, which is still on my bookshelf.

The thing with printed books is that you have to type in those snippets yourself, and the act of typing out code reinforces knowledge. I only used the cookbook for each new problem a few times, after which I have committed the relevant bits to memory.

The act of copy&pasting from Stack Overflow might have the same reinforcement effect, but perhaps not as much because it didn't cost as much effort. The act of having a bot generate code probably doesn't do much reinforcement at all, although perhaps these new developers will be better at asking questions or creating prompts.