[rpdillon]

Yeah, I'll never forget pirating Turbo Pascal off of AOL in the 90s, going to my local library and taking out a book about Turbo Pascal so I could learn what I could do with it. Ended up coding a program that embedded metadata for all of Rush's songs, their titles, and how long they were, so that you could plan out a mixtape of just Rush's songs. Even allowed you to specify what kind of tape you had, so you could adjust each side, whether it was 45 minutes or 30 minutes, things like that. It was called Rush Mixtape Creator, and I shared the compiled binary on Usenet. Got emails about it as long as six years later asking me to make changes and update it. It was the first actual program I ever distributed. 1995.

Coding was different back then.

[ASalazarMX]

Different and yet very similar.

Then we used a manual or book to learn how to do things. Later we used search engines. Later we used Stack Overflow. Each change made us a little embarrased because people could think we were just copy-pasting blindly.

Now there is AI, but here a lot of people are actually copy-pasting blindly. We should be using them to learn how to do things, not to actually do the things without supervision.