> Where does this idea come from that good programmers were ever cool with that?

r/programminghumor mostly. It was always tongue in cheek, but people took it too seriously.

However, the number of times I’ve gone over to help a colleague and realized they were trying to copy/paste code from SO, without even reading the context of the thread is baffling. Like, why did you expect it to work in the first place? I really try to be humble and not make assumptions about people competencies but it’s really hard to have those experiences and not think the average programmer is just an idiot. It’s no wonder AI is helping people when this was the baseline.

Some things are easier to verify than they are to solve, right?

So if you see an answer on stack overflow, read it, comprehend it, and you can pretty easily mentally verify the correctness to a sufficient degree of confidence…

I guess I’m not worth my salt.