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Comment by tripledry | Hacker News Reader

> Random copy-pasta from stackoverflow anyone?

Was this a common thing? I don't know which bubble is more common, but personally I can't recall ever working with someone who couldn't explain what they did (just copy paste?), except for maybe configurations.

In my experience, people most definitely understand less of the technical implementation now vs before. Heck, not only technical, I've seen presentations from business where the presenter clearly vibed their deck and don't understand the content.

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My bubble is opposite - majority did not understand simple things. I ve seen people randomly trying SO advice on “fixing” git repo, mutating objects passed as arguments (because it works!), not understanding what is env variable.

Your example just proves the point: AI is not a problem - it’s a leverage. Give it to someone who don’t care - they will do as much damage as they can.

But imho the issue is not ignorant people. It’s lack of leadership. Somehow those people got selected for the job and still keep it.

I think it's both. I want to agree with you but it's also just human nature, I notice myself slacking even when I care, because it's easy. The human brain is really good at finding shortcuts.

It's like saying it's the kids fault for being addicted to social medias and assigning no responsibility to the providers.

To be clear, I'm not advocating anti-AI laws or arguing with you, just blurting out my thoughts. Ultimately I simply feel this will not be a good thing for tech and human understanding in the short / medium term, but this is just based on vibes, like most arguments on AI are.

It was a huge thing, and I lived through all of it, yet never ran into a problem where copy-and-pasting would have been the lowest resistance solution. I never even ran into a problem where asking the question and waiting for a response would have made more sense than asking internally or working through it myself. The most difficult problems are relatively conceptual, which SO didn't like anyway.

I never really got it. I think it depended bigly on which domain and stack you were in.

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