You can see the quality if you’re an experienced coder. My comment lacks personal context in that I was in school in 2010 and there were plenty of my classmates who would plug snippets into their projects without fundamentally understanding what it did or learning what the project was supposed to teach us. Similar to a shortcut with AI in 2025.
There are definitely people who cut & pasted from stack overflow in the work environment, too. The difference is that I, as the clean-up crew, could google their code and find the post it came from … and then I could read the comments and figure out wtf they thought they were trying to do. When they paste LLM-generated code in, there’s no trace of where the dumbfuckery came from.
Just thinking about it makes me glad I’m near retirement.
that was exactly my point, for the “non experts” googling and using AI is very much not the same, as googling provides them with a lot more actual information (quality, alternatives)
You can see the quality if you’re an experienced coder. My comment lacks personal context in that I was in school in 2010 and there were plenty of my classmates who would plug snippets into their projects without fundamentally understanding what it did or learning what the project was supposed to teach us. Similar to a shortcut with AI in 2025.
There are definitely people who cut & pasted from stack overflow in the work environment, too. The difference is that I, as the clean-up crew, could google their code and find the post it came from … and then I could read the comments and figure out wtf they thought they were trying to do. When they paste LLM-generated code in, there’s no trace of where the dumbfuckery came from.
Just thinking about it makes me glad I’m near retirement.
that was exactly my point, for the “non experts” googling and using AI is very much not the same, as googling provides them with a lot more actual information (quality, alternatives)