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Comment by xiasongh | Hacker News Reader

Didn't people already do that before, copy and pasting code off stack overflow? I don't like it either but this issue has always existed, but perhaps it is more common now

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Maybe it's because I'm self-taught, but I have always accounted for every line I push.

It's insulting that companies are paying people to cosplay as programmers.

It's probably more common among self-taught programmers (and I say that as one myself). Most go through the early stage of copying chunks of code and seeing if they work. Maybe not blindly copying it, but still copying code from examples or whatever. I know I did (except it was 25 years ago from Webmonkey or the php.net comments section rather than StackOverflow). I'd imagine formally-educated programmers can skip some (though not all) of that by having to learn more of the theory at first.

If people are being paid to copy and run random code, more power to them. I wouldn't have dreamt of getting a programming job until I was literate.

I've seen self taught and graduates alike do that.

Now there is even lesser excuse for not knowing what it does, because the same chatGPT that gave you the code, can explain it too. That wasn't a luxury available in copy/paste-from-StackOverflow days (though explanations with varying degrees of depth were available there too).

Yes, and I think the mistakes that LLMs commonly make are less problematic than Stack Overflow. LLMs seem to most often either hallucinate APIs, or use outdated ones. They're easier to detect when they just don't work. They're not perfect, but seem less inclined to generate the bad practices and security holes that are the bread and butter of Stack Overflow. In fact they're pretty good at identifying those sort of problems in existing code.

Or importing a new library that's not been audited. Or compile it with a compiler that's not been audited? Or run it on silicon that's not been audited?

We can draw the line in many places.

I would take generated code that a rookie obtained from an llm and copied without understanding all of it, but that he has thoughtfully tested, over something he authored himself and submitted for review without enough checks.

> We can draw the line in many places.

That doesn't make those places equivalent.

That's a false dichotomy. People can write code themselves and thoroughly test it too.

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