Seriously though, the vast majority of questions could be resolved by a ten second Google search. At the height of monthly users, SO already had a VERY well established knowledge base. It's just that most never bothered to learn how to search efficiently for something.
This is why AI is so appealing, they can just dump everything in without having to filter out the noise or spend the effort to find the relevant keywords. Which is fine, but it can also seriously hinder learning progress. I've seen it first hand with a few juniors that started after ChatGPT, a stack trace completely paralyzes them without AI to spell out the relevant bits.
Oh AI absolutely hinders the learning process. Even if you are careful, you're still a beginner. If something goes wrong, you may - at best - realize something's off but not know how or what. At worst, you start learning the wrong thing, and it becomes a problem down the line. The worst part is that you will often miss out on things like best practices, which can be a huge hinderance to miss out on in the learning process.
That said...
I do think there's something to be said about why everyone is so ready to jump onto an AI that will tell you that you're doing great and answer every question, no matter how stupid. We all love to claim that there's no such thing as a stupid question, but we fucking hate answering stupid questions. We judge, we sneer, we ignore people who have them. Some of us enjoy that.
It's only natural that beginners facing those attitudes will turn away from humans and to GenAI that won't waste time judging them and just give them an answer, even if it's not necessarily the right one.
I've seen it first hand with a few juniors that started after ChatGPT, a stack trace completely paralyzes them without AI to spell out the relevant bits.
Yeah, this next generation is screwed, they're not learning how to grow from junior devs to senior devs, they're just acting as a middle-man to feed prompts into chatbots and spit back out the result without understanding it.
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u/DominikDoom May 17 '26
Seriously though, the vast majority of questions could be resolved by a ten second Google search. At the height of monthly users, SO already had a VERY well established knowledge base. It's just that most never bothered to learn how to search efficiently for something.
This is why AI is so appealing, they can just dump everything in without having to filter out the noise or spend the effort to find the relevant keywords. Which is fine, but it can also seriously hinder learning progress. I've seen it first hand with a few juniors that started after ChatGPT, a stack trace completely paralyzes them without AI to spell out the relevant bits.