[vunderba]

This comparison of coding assistants to Stack Overflow comes up a lot so I feel like it needs to be addressed.

It is SIMILAR - it is not the same. There's a minimal element of interaction by virtue of the fact that SO code is usually not completely bespoke for the developer's requirements. They'll need to do things like change variable names, re-arrange some parts of it, etc.

The junior dev using an integrated LLMs (like with Cursor) has to do NONE of this. They simply hit the Tab key to accept and move on with their day.

There's a far larger danger of induced passivity.

[AndrewDucker]

Also, Stack Overflow regularly came with multiple solutions and comments on each solution discussing drawbacks and alternatives. I've learned a lot from those.

[ceejayoz]

And a lot more likely to (often correctly) say "you should not do this thing".

[satvikpendem]

I wrote another much longer comment but you summarized it nicely, there becomes a sort of learned helplessness that even experienced engineers will start experiencing, as I had when I used Cursor, because it's just much easier to continue pressing tab than to actually review every single change thoroughly, and that is where the danger lies, especially with subtle hallucination-induced bugs.