I don’t mean to bash on SO, it’s really valuable sometimes. But corporate culture (faster is always better) and a new breed of programmers that don’t really care, have left us with a big part of the profession that are unable to produce anything new, or solve any unique problems.
It does feel like the proportions might be changing and the quality of software is trending downward, but I think you have it right that the risk of programmers being too "GPT-reliant" is the continuation of a long, intergenerational pattern.
this is something i get jealous of older programmers who grew up on old computers, with printed manuals...when languages were smaller, and the scope of programs were also smaller...and didnt require external libraries.
Now, it is kinda expected that programs support "text" - non-lgc alphabets, context-sensitive collations, ligatures and cursive text, mixed bidirectional text, combining characters, input method support, locale-dependent string interpolation logic.
And one doen't simply handle all of that, not without bolting something else in your program that is probably larger that your program.
And that isn't even instants in time; those are much harder to handle correctly all the time.
For me, the alternative to using ChatGPT to figure some weird piece of Bash trivial out isn't doing the work myself, meticulously and at great length. It's losing interest and not figuring that thing out at all.