Back in the day, you couldn’t ask stack overflow about your specific business or project. You were forced to build at least some level of understanding of what you were doing on the job or risk your lack of knowledge being obvious (and obviously holding you back).

What we’re seeing now is industrial grade ignorance that can only be observed in in-person or video meetings.

Actually that's fine. StackOverflow, Reddit, HN are or at least were populated by people. Looking to them for answers is doing a survey of best practices for a topic and will at least tell you what is popularly true.

Asking AI sometimes gives you the same answer as AI is trained on these same forums, but not always.

Your prompt structure and/or inference bugs (which is a lot more common in smaller providers or local hosting) can change the answer AI gives.

And ofcourse, if there's low/no data, AI will still give an answer even though it's not in the safe zone.

Stack overflow or Claude or Wikipedia…it doesn’t matter.

We don’t usually tolerate copy-paste answers at school so why should it count at work?

I mean it was always easy enough to say "Hey not quite sure but I did find this post on SO, in case it helps"

No one is saying to pretend you memorized everything. They’re saying they’d rather have an “I don’t know” than a half-assed ai response (or stack overflow cut and paste).

Or, if you get nerd-sniped by the question and spend some time figuring it out, that’s fine too.

But if you want to be helpful but don’t want to take the time to figure it out yourself, don’t just forward the question to AI or send me a link to the first result in Google because I could have done that myself(and may have done it already). Just say you don’t know, which is a paradoxically more useful response.

Besides just not wanting to look insecure, there are good reasons to include sources, even in cases where you actually have the info memorized.

It shows someone where they can find that information for themselves in the future. That way they don't have to bug you later if they forget and it can give them a useful resource they can explore. If nothing else it demonstrates that at least one other person had the same understanding of something that I did which could be reassuring.