Comment by lghh
2 years ago
So are StackOverflow answers. When I look at something on StackOverflow, I am expected to use my expertise and the context of my work to adapt the collection of answers to what I'm working on. StackOverflow doesn't tell me anything I could not have figured out on my own, but searching through some library's source code to find under which situations an error can occur isn't always a good use of my time. ChatGPT fills a similar role. I type into it, much like how I would with Google, get some output, validate it, and adapt it to the specific problem I'm addressing.
> So are StackOverflow answers.
You don't embrace SO overlords though ;) Meanwhile with ChatGPT and Copilot people are losing their minds it seems. I've yet to find them useful for anything beyond mere curiosities and one-off queries like improving corporate-sounding texts.
>You don't embrace SO overlords though
I mean, don't we? The number of times I've heard SWE humorously defined as "people who copy and paste from Stackoverflow"...
(My favorite: https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/03/31/the-key-copy-paste/)