Be Kind, Rewind: How AI Became Every Junior Dev's Emotional Support Animal

Grandpa dev just unlocked a core memory. Stack Overflow was the OG before ChatGPT started writing everyone's code. Back in the day, you'd copy-paste solutions from SO with religious devotion, close all 47 tabs, and pretend you understood what async/await actually does. The kid found it in the basement like some ancient artifact, probably next to a Flash Player installer and a jQuery plugin from 2011. Gramps is about to drop the entire lore of marking questions as duplicate, getting roasted for not showing your research effort, and the legendary Jon Skeet with his 1.4 million rep. Those were simpler times when you had to actually read documentation AND get passive-aggressively told your question already exists somewhere in a thread from 2009.

Content Answer Recommended for you Why should I hire a software engineer if I can just copy and paste code from Stack Overflow? X

Content COPY PASTED SOLOUERY FROM STACK OVERFLOW AND IT SAYS "19243 ROW(S) AFFECTED" JUNIOR DEVELOPER ME

Content Tweet Bile Overflow BileOverflow 000 Full Stack Developer: A developer who believes javascript is the best choice for the frontend. And the backend. And the database. 9:38 PM Oct 10, 2020 Twitter Web App

FIVE TABS?! FIVE?!?! *clutches RAM dramatically* Are you TRYING to insult the entire developer community?! The audacity of suggesting we limit ourselves to a mere FIVE Chrome tabs is the most ridiculous thing I've heard since someone said "this code will work on the first try." Every self-respecting developer needs AT LEAST 47 Stack Overflow tabs, 12 documentation pages, 8 GitHub issues, 3 YouTube tutorials, and that one tab with the solution you found 3 weeks ago but were too afraid to close. Chrome eating 16GB of RAM isn't a bug—it's a lifestyle choice, darling! 💅

Remember when you'd post a genuine question on Stack Overflow and within minutes someone would mark it as duplicate, tell you to read the documentation, and close it before you could even respond? Good times. Now with ChatGPT and AI assistants, Stack Overflow is basically that old man yelling at clouds while the kids have moved on to getting their answers instantly without the side of condescension. The platform that built its empire on gatekeeping knowledge is watching developers quietly slip away to tools that actually... help them. The irony? Stack Overflow's toxic culture of "RTFM" and "marked as duplicate of a question from 2009 that doesn't answer your problem" basically trained us to desperately want ANY alternative. They had one job: be helpful. Instead, they became the programming equivalent of that DMV employee who enjoys telling you you're in the wrong line.