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Comment by Rastonbury | Hacker News Reader

As a non-professional coder, I'm honestly surprised there seems quite a few professional coders in this thread who don't do the first Stackoverflow first scenario. As someone learning code, shoehorning SO code when I don't understand 20% of the replies made the learning curve so steep, chatGPT has made this so much easier by changing it and telling me why will/won't work, even when watching out for or correcting hallucinations, overall its a time save

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As I've matured in my career I've gone to SO less and less, to the point where I mostly avoid it now. I use tools, languages, and libraries with which I am now highly familiar--perhaps more so than the average SO answerer, although I guess it would be arrogant to say for sure--and so the bulk of my questions are edge cases in my knowledge which are more easily answered by reading source code or specs.

I suspect this is one of the differences between people that find GPT helpful and people that don't--it seems much more potentially helpful when you are in a less familiar environment. In my work, when I run into unexpected behavior, if I knew what question to ask then I would probably already know the answer too. Until the day I can feed in an entire codebase and ask "What's wrong with this? vaguely gestures at everything", I don't expect that to change significantly.

That makes sense, and its funny because the other reply I got a joke was about how bad coders don't even bother going to SO

Probably because you're deep specialized in something or have stagnated on a company for a long time ? I cannot imagine knowing everything about what I am working on, that has changed dramatically every 3-4 months even within the same company

When you've been working for a while - not necessarily even for the same company- you gather an internal library of knowledge that you can pattern match against for solutions. You may not have seen the exact same thing, but you may have seen something like it. There are hardly ever an entirely novel class of bugs anymore

Yeah definitely. But the tooling is very diverse in big companies. They might use every database under the sun, one day you might be doing React another one AngularJS, one day Django another day FastAPI, one day k8s, other day terraform.. at least my brain is very limited and it can be helpful

You’re surprised most professionals would want to actually try and diagnose a problem instead of trying to copy and paste a shoehorned solution? What? Most professionals I work with actually try to debug code, look at docs, etc. You know, research, like a real job.

> I'm honestly surprised there seems quite a few professional coders in this thread who don't do the first Stackoverflow first scenario

You just found your path to become a better developer than the majority then

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