Copy-paste, then and now

5 years ago, everybody joked that blindly copy-pasting from Stack Overflow (without fully understanding the code) was frowned upon.

Fast forward to today, it is possible to create codebases without even reading all the added lines of code.

I’m not even going to touch on the subject of how much tech debt, bad practices, bugs, and unintended UI/UX this can introduce.

But working on projects used to teach you something. You built skills that stayed with you; even if syntax or other shallow things are forgotten … you grew through trial and error, understanding trade-offs, and I’m not sure how this will happen if we distance ourselves from the codebase.

AI is one of the most valuable tools, but it’s important to remember that how you use it still determines whether it leads to long-term or short-term gains.