now, instead of copying off stackoverflow, it's gonna be off copilot. It will enable a lot more people to code who otherwise would not. Whether this is a good outcome or not...
This is even another example of just optimising for the easy bit.
I could hire 50 juniors that can code tomorrow if I wanted to. But even with an unlimited budget, finding good devs that can make it through a 2 year project without coming out of it with a big ball of unmaintainable shit is difficult.
The gulf from beginner to expert is already big, and the more crutches you use early on, the bigger it's going to get. There's a lot of people that wash out of the industry before they reach the point of being able to comfortably build good software (and be solely responsible for it).
I think copilot is another item in a long list of things that's good for big businesses (who optimise heavily for getting passable results with 1,000 mediocre devs instead of 50 good ones) and terrible for individuals in the long run.
The more experience I gain the less I use SO and more I just go to the sources or read the docs.
With googling for SO answers I have to parse the question, find a modern answer (because the accepted one is 10 years old and won’t work), parse that and adapt it to my problem. With documentation I just search for what I need and go straight to solving my problem and I’ve never felt more productive.
I feel like people new to programming focus too much on a specific problem at hand instead of learning the problem solving themselves. I wish I would’ve learned to figure out the issue myself from the start.
I feel like jobs where you can constantly rely on your already acrued knowledge are rare. Or maybe it’s just me and I work in fields where I have to learn new technologies constantly?
Recently I’ve been doing a lot of OCaml and it’s been tough as there’s very little on stackoverflow. Every time I have a question I have to spend a lot of effort looking for the answer instead of relying on someone before me having the same problem and posting the answer online.
> programming focus too much on a specific problem at hand instead of learning the problem solving themselves
you got the importance and focus wrong. People don't care for problem solving skills - they care for the specific problem being solved. That's why they pay someone to fix it.
They don't want to pay someone to "learn" problem solving (because the stakeholder don't care).
Stackoverflow immensely helped this sort of use-case - may be at the detriment of quality - but i cannot deny that copilot is going to accelerate this use-case.
Same. I was wanting to learn more about ActivityPub recently, and after reading the first two web search results, I remembered: this'll probably just be easier if I just read parts of the W3 spec (and it was)
My use of stackoverflow has vastly faded over time. I only ever go there to look for hints on ways to do something better, better practice, newer ways or a simpler way.
There are more and more wrong answers posted by what looks like the same people who have MVP on the Apple, Microsoft and Google forums who just whore for kudos points. I can't understand the motivation to dilute something of value.
>...now, instead of copying off stackoverflow, it's gonna be off copilot.
Eventually, I'm seeing another breed of SO questions, making sense of Copilot suggested fragments and seeking reassurance or alternatives... Then possibly the copying off, just as now.
now, instead of copying off stackoverflow, it's gonna be off copilot. It will enable a lot more people to code who otherwise would not. Whether this is a good outcome or not...