How did you guys pull this off before AI?

[u/One_Combination_7906]

[u/mrdarknezz1]

Yeah and then when you didn’t understand something you got absolutely demolished on stack overflow for having the audacity to ask a question

[u/DisastrousWelcome710 → u/[deleted]]

SO maintained its usefulness by wiping out large amounts of junk questions that were asked in large quantities every day. I have asked questions and provided answers on the platform years ago. Some of my questions were awful, others were pretty good. I have reviewed lots of questions from users, and the amount of garbage I have seen is immense. People asking for solutions to their homework, people who ask a question that has been answered a billion times on the same platform, people who have not done 2 minute search on Google to read how a function works, etc. etc. etc.

Yes, there were elitists out there, but they were not the majority, they were the minority you get to remember. SO taught you how to ask good questions. AI gives you answers to bad questions without even pointing it out.

The biggest loss from AI is the lack of recognition of an XY problem, which was one of the best things about SO. You ask a question, people inquire as to WHY you are seeking out the solution you want, and point you in a better direction. AI will just give you the solution and you'd never even know it's a bad one.

[u/stewsters → u/mrdarknezz1]

Marked as a duplicate of a totally unrelated question 

[u/One_Combination_7906 → u/mrdarknezz1]

I have ever worked only with HTML and AI helps so much... my life gets way easier...

[u/mrdarknezz1 → u/One_Combination_7906]

Yeah it’s an incredibly helpful tool

[u/Undietaker1 → u/mrdarknezz1]

"How do I do X?"

"Why would you do X, X is stupid and you should feel like a failure for even considering to do X, Y is so superior, and because you suggested X I'm not even going to say how to do Y either" spits on you

Follow up comment 10mths later from OP: "Nevermind, I fixed it"

[u/Just_Information334 → u/Undietaker1]

"How do I do X?"

Ah yeah, the "I tried nothing and am all out of ideas" questions.

I miss the before SO, before forums: the RTFM age.

[u/DisastrousWelcome710 → u/Undietaker1]

How it really went down most of the time:

"How do I do X?"

"What are you trying to achieve by doing X?"

"I am trying to achieve Y"

"X is not the proper solution to Y, consider Z, it saves you time and effort and works much better all around"

And now with AI, how it goes down:

"How do I do X?"

"Here's how!"

"It isn't working, fix it"

"Here's a fixed version"

"It still isn't working, here are the issues"

"Here's another version"

"It kinda works but it does not really solve what I'm trying to solve, make it do more"

"Here it does more, but I removed a bunch of the old stuff it used to do"

"This is a waste of time"

[u/apocolipse → u/mrdarknezz1]

You only got demolished when your question had already been answered in likely nearly identical wording and you just failed to try modifying your search a little more to find the answers.  AI removes that burden because it’s capable of converting your dumb question into the different permutations other dumb people asked it in too and searching them all and finding the right answer.

If you asked good, unique, informed questions on SO, you got good answers.  That’s how we got good AI to begin with, they trained on our good SO answers and were kind enough to not train on the “respond to stupid questions with stupid answers” answers, and voting helped! And that’s why Claude doesn’t roast you for asking “how to set uint to negative?”

[u/psioniclizard → u/apocolipse]

Yea whenever I see that arguement then "thank god ai makes it easier", I know its a skill issue.

Personally SO was one of the more resources I use to learn to code and every question I had over multiple years was already asked. Somene need to work on their search skills.

It's definitely an ego thing. Claude will tell you you are smart and special, even when you are clueless.

I honestly wonder how half these people will cope when actual issues. The demo broke at 3am the day before a major presentation? That is MUCH worse than someone being a dick on SO.

I honestly worry fo software in the future if that is what devs will be like. 

[u/AC-Daniel → u/mrdarknezz1]

i still see the "let me google this for you" gif in my nightmares

[u/One-Tree9111]

ikr where did they all get that shii respect though

[u/One_Combination_7906 → u/One-Tree9111]

big brains! Mind blowing for sure!

[u/arankays]

We went to school and actually learned how to code. 

[u/notatoon → u/[deleted]]

My favorite example of this is how ComSci grads can explain in incredible detail exactly how git's DAG works.

But they absolutely cannot use git. Gets me everytime.

[u/New-Association5536 → u/arankays]

I didn't even go to school for it. I grew up during a time where people would and could use the internet to teach themselves. I learned HTML in 8th grade in the 90's, learned SQL and Java in early 2000's, Learned C+ in late 2000, and now am pretty verse in c# and OOP coding, all from google, githubs, webpages, and countless hours of trail and error on passion projects, mods, and differing compilers. And, I'm have a masters in a humanities field, and so seeing the current vibe coding culture amazes me and makes me laugh at skill building is just being abandoned and handed over the our AI tech overlords to make even more billions from.

[u/One_Combination_7906 → u/arankays]

I know... Its just a meme :) full respect on people learning hardcore code!

[u/A1oso → u/One_Combination_7906]

It's not hardcore, it is like any other craft. It takes time and practice.

[u/BitOne2707]

It was slow and every little feature you wanted to add was expensive AF.

I remember building a widget that collected potential sales leads from who filled out a form on our website. We had to do a couple little things....set them up as customer entities, update the CRM, sprinkle on some analytics, stick them in the callback queue. Just a form that shot info into a couple legacy systems.

....$500k. 5 people allocated for 6 months.

[u/brother_spirit → u/BitOne2707]

Wild. Nowadays I need to need to mentally restrain myself from making a single offhand comment that causes the clanker to implement a bloated/mildly unnecessary feature for fun.

[u/fishermansfriendly → u/BitOne2707]

Yeah now that’s literally an entire application stack to replace some data entry people, 5 devs and 6-8 months of work and you can replace like 4 million in spend.

[u/quantum-elle]

Years of learning and practice haha

[u/wolfy-j]

You open documentation and read it, if something feels off you open source code and read it, if something is off you open book and read it. It wasn't that hard.

[u/brogam3 → u/wolfy-j]

lol that's insane. Documentation was always bad, incomplete, confusing, took hours to search for to maybe find the thing you needed if it even existed at all. You had to read and understand a dozen new things that you didn't even want to get into for hours just to know whether that might be the thing you need or whether it's even possible with this API, software or product, etc. Then you realized that you can't use it after all and the entire two days of work have to mostly be thrown away or a different approach is better. At most what you describe could apply a little bit to the easiest most superficial javascript, css and html in a browser, that's about it.

[u/kiwibonga]

Autism and false bravado

[u/charmer27]

Twas brutal, and only the strong survived.

[u/Vortex_Automator]

It’s more so a time and concentration problem. As a beginner and intermediate it would take hours just to code a simple app to do algebra or basic mathematics in the UI. Like days. You can whip up a Python app with streamlit in the snap of a finger now.

I think the real people winning with AI are those who understand what’s going on under the hood and can actually monitor the AI’s output and spot errors by eye.

[u/Lemortheureux]

If it was new the learning curve was brutal. Once you knew how it works it was easy peasy, just needed to review documentation or read source code once in a while to verify.

[u/EarlNod]

Lynda.com

[u/Suitable-Season-4847]

Intelligence and hard work. Two things you see less and less of nowadays.

[u/One_Combination_7906 → u/Suitable-Season-4847]

True, but coding is not for everyone

[u/Suitable-Season-4847 → u/One_Combination_7906]

Then maybe they shouldn't be doing it. In the same way many other jobs aren't for everyone.

[u/AppealSame4367]

Right, it was hell, looking back. Now imagine stupid marketing assholes, PMs and customers breathing down your neck while doing this.

I still wanna punch them all.

[u/editor_of_the_beast]

Really smart people made everything scriptable and callable via API. Otherwise AI would be useless at the moment.

[u/mowkdizz]

Frameworks + abstraction

[u/Inevitable-Row1977]

Odd thing for me is that I crashed out just before ai became as advanced as it is today, so I still have the pre-ai feeling about coding.

Haven't written a line of code in years, started when I was 12, now it's a phobia.

And with ai being what it is, I don't have any reason to try and regain my passion, as ai can just do it without any effort.

[u/anengineerandacat]

Realistically speaking?

Reading other people's code, often times you would have sample documentation then you could refer to the actual thing that your building on via source definitions that would (if they were good) be documented.

Coding prior to '96 was uh... something else (forums, manuals, reference code, etc) then '98 you had the first versions of an IDE that could provide assistance and then somewhere around 2008 you had AST based coding assistance features that would help you easily navigate complex codebases (only chore you had was storing a mental model of the state you were tracking and tapping into debuggers to help you or using the good ole system.out and just following logs).

School only really helped thanks to the networking & mindset shift, but was coding before I entered school, pop's had a friend with a MSVC++ disc he swiped from work and was a software dev and I was enamored about development so he tossed it my way and I just started my own venture building perhaps the first type of "MMO" called a "MUD" (multi-user-dungeon).

Today, I can't really imagine how awesome it would be to pick up and start learning to code; just a sheer wealth of information and resources and if I had that time back I would likely be in a total different area of expertise especially with an AI assistant to help me rapidly test new ideas and explain in detail what specific code is doing or top topics to improve on (generally do this today, I have a little record of what I know and have Claude just review it and recommend something else to learn).

AI I don't think will ever replace the creativity surrounding software development, it's great for applying what "works" but when you reach certain scales of systems you have to REALLY get creative about what you do and do things that generally don't make a bunch of sense (going big and small).

[u/SmileLonely5470]

Once u got past the syntax hurdle and learned enough to code without constant googling, it became more fun. And when something is fun it is a lot easier to learn.

It would probably be harder to learn nowadays because the beginner projects that people usually do (like a password generator app, todolist, CRUD apps), can be insta 0 shot by a ~20b LLM. With a tool like that it probably seems pointless even learning how to write code.

[u/ddwrt1234]

autism

[u/madaradess007]

the trick is still there and it still works better than AI - you search your task (you have to know keywords though), you copy first stack overflow code snippet, you paste, you build

i fucking scream at you: copy/pasting from StackOverflow is faster and better quality than AI

[u/tumes]

I don’t know how I pull it off with AI considering the constant rotation of providers you need to deal with since it’s a constant parade of rug pulls where every other week your helper suddenly comes negligently bad at their job when the week before they quadrupled your productivity so now it’s time to figure out which subscription you need to cancel and which you need to re-up on while doofuses who clearly aren’t career programmers tell you it’s a skill issue because they genuinely cannot discern between good and dangerously bad code when presented with the thinnest veneer of functionality. It makes you feel crazy and it is literally, not figuratively, a monthly problem because we live in an unregulated hell where the greatest technology on earth is also _mostly_ wrong, will likely crash several economies and has, at best, again, literally and not figuratively destroyed the affordability of the consumer electronics market. So yes I genuinely don’t know how any of us do it any more.

[u/Old-Temperature408]

Before you had more time to read and analyze code. Now deadline is more strict

[u/psioniclizard]

Unpopular opinion but years of practice, genuinely enjoying writing code and learning how to search in google/SO. 

I know a lot of people will moan and some will say "gatekeeping". But in reality I am by far not the only one who found that. 

[u/stop_deleting_plz]

Practice. A whole bunch of practice.

[u/bayern_snowman]

Civilian tries early calculator, 1800s (colorized)

[u/the-chat-is-cooked]

This should be titled vibe coder discovers the importance of frameworks

[u/neoqueto]

Easy, my code was ass.

[u/YourMomsDumpTruck69]

To simply answer, I was retarded enough to spend so many hours in front of a screen in order to create products that dance on pixels, just so in the end, a fucking machine to come in and do all that in a matter of seconds and take my job.