The other thing with Stack Overflow answers, despite posters often being dicks, is that you got conversation on what the best method was and pros and cons of solutions, and you could ask clarifying questions and determine what the best solution was for your particular situation. And if someone had incorrect info, they’d often be corrected.
In that sense, if you’re a person who actually thinks through the answers you’re receiving, you can make good use of LLMs but the cost of LLMs (the strain on our planet’s resources) isn’t worth the trade off. You also lose something in terms of how your brain functions when you rely heavily on LLMs imo, because it becomes very easy to lose some good habits.
That said, if LLMs weren’t such a strain on the planet and weren’t tainted by corporate greed, I would love them as they are a great force multiplier for a worker that knows what they’re doing.
Stack Overflow usage has always come with the condition that you understood what the answer was doing and that it actually applied to your problem, on top of feeling that it looked like a high quality solution to it instead of crappy code. I mean, I guess in that sense, the people who blindly copied everything from the internet were the first vibe coders…
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