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Comment by bmitc | Hacker News Reader

You made me think: it feels like ChatGPT is just a less accurate StackOverflow answer generator. The culture of needing to use StackOverflow is not a good one, so I'm not sure why people are considering ChatGPT to be.

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"The culture of needing to use StackOverflow is not a good one"

Not being able to write code without it might be bad but it's a valuable resource and you should use it when it's available to you (for both)

Counterpoint: ChatGPT will answer your question in a few moments whereas on StackOverflow, you might need up to 60 minutes for the question to be closed as "offtopic". ChatGPT never asks "why do you want to do this?"

Who even asks on stack overflow? The exercise is the generalize your issue, and then the thread from 7 years ago with your answer appears.

but what's the point if a new tool does it for you?

This is one of my major concerns with ChatGPT, and I'm not sure why it hasn't been discussed more. StackOverflow is a massively useful resource, to be sure, but it takes knowledge to wade through the outdated (or just plain bad) answers. StackOverflow can be a useful starting point, but I don't think I have ever copy/pasted code directly from StackOverflow. I don't think any LLM will be able to replace the skill of reading the docs and learning your tools.

I have no doubt that ChatGPT will become even better than StackOverflow at answering questions. Is this really going to make us better programmers?

Yes, and at least StackOverflow will often give you some minority opinion, not just a snippet to be pasted into your code. Especially if something a little tricky like cryptography.

Consider this classic: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12122159/how-to-do-a-htt...

Yeah, it seems like a better search engine would be easier and more accurate to use in this case.

but it can usually answer your specific question. not loke close to your question.

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