Stack Overflow Used to Be My Copilot

Long before GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude, or any of the other AI tools developers use today, we already had something helping us write code.

It was called Stack Overflow.

And if you’ve been developing software for any reasonable amount of time, you probably know exactly what I’m talking about.

You’d be working on something, hit an error you had absolutely no idea how to fix, copy the error message into Google, and…

There it was.

A Stack Overflow question from eight years ago describing your exact problem.

Even better, somebody had already answered it.

Problem solved.

Well… usually.

Copy. Paste. Pray.

There was practically a development workflow built around Stack Overflow.

1. Get an error.
2. Copy the error.
3. Paste it into Google.
4. Add “Stack Overflow” if Google wasn’t cooperating.
5. Find somebody who had the same problem in 2014.
6. Copy the accepted answer.
7. Paste it into your code.
8. Pray.

And somehow, a surprising amount of software was built this way.

Obviously, I’m exaggerating a little.

But only a little.

Stack Overflow wasn’t just a website I occasionally visited. For years, it was one of the most important tools I had as a developer.

Somebody Had Already Made Your Mistake

That was the beautiful thing about Stack Overflow.

No matter how bizarre your problem seemed, chances were pretty good that somebody else had already encountered it.

And somebody smarter than both of you had explained how to fix it.

Sometimes you’d find the exact solution.

Other times you’d find something close enough to point you in the right direction.

And occasionally you’d find a question that perfectly described your problem…

…with zero answers.

Those were terrifying.

Even worse was finding your exact question and seeing:

“Marked as duplicate.”

Great!

So you click the original question.

It was asked in 2011.

The accepted answer uses a library that hasn’t existed for six years.

Perfect.

Then AI Showed Up

Today, my workflow looks very different.

Instead of taking an error, searching Google, opening five Stack Overflow tabs, reading through answers and trying to piece together a solution, I can ask an AI assistant directly.

And I can provide context.

That’s the part that changed everything for me.

I don’t just have to search:

C# object reference not set to an instance of an object

I can say:

“Here’s the code. Here’s what I’m trying to accomplish. Here’s the exception I’m getting. Why is this happening?”

And instead of getting an answer to somebody else’s vaguely similar problem, I can get an explanation tailored to the code I’m actually working on.

That’s a massive change.

Stack Overflow Was Basically the Original Copilot

Looking back, though, the basic idea isn’t really that different.

Developers have always looked things up.

Nobody remembers every method, API, syntax rule, framework configuration option, Docker command, SQL statement, CSS property, or obscure compiler error they’ve ever encountered.

At least I sure as hell don’t.

Being a software engineer has never been about memorizing every possible answer.

It’s knowing how to find the answer.

For years, Stack Overflow was where I found it.

Now AI often fills that role.

That’s why I think of Stack Overflow as my original Copilot.

It sat there quietly in another browser tab waiting for me to inevitably break something.

But There Was Something Good About the Old Way

Here’s where things get interesting.

AI is unquestionably more convenient for the way I work today.

But I’m not convinced convenience is always better for learning.

With Stack Overflow, you usually had to do some work.

You searched for your problem.

You read the question.

You read the accepted answer.

Then you read the comments telling the accepted answer why it was terrible.

Then you found another answer with fewer votes that somebody claimed was actually the correct way to do it.

Then you opened the documentation.

Then you changed some code.

Then you broke something else.

It was messy.

But during that process, you often learned something.

AI can remove a lot of that friction.

That’s fantastic when you’re trying to get something done.

But that friction sometimes forced us to understand the problem.

AI Has Its Own Version of Copy-Paste Programming

Of course, we haven’t eliminated the old:

Copy. Paste. Pray.

We’ve just upgraded it.

Now you can ask AI to write an entire function, paste it into your project and hit Run.

And when it doesn’t compile, you copy the error back into the AI.

It changes the code.

You paste it again.

New error.

Copy.

Paste.

Repeat.

Congratulations.

We’ve reinvented Stack Overflow-driven development with fewer browser tabs.

The danger is the same as it always was: using code you don’t understand.

It didn’t matter whether that code came from a Stack Overflow answer written in 2013 or an AI model in 2026.

If you’re putting it into your application, you should understand what it’s doing.

AI Is Better at Context

There is one area where modern AI coding tools have completely changed things for me.

Context.

Stack Overflow couldn’t see my project.

It didn’t know my architecture.

It didn’t know why I made a particular design decision.

It didn’t know that changing one interface was going to break twelve other things.

It answered questions.

Modern coding assistants can do much more.

They can help trace a problem across files, explain unfamiliar code, generate tests, refactor something, suggest implementations and help reason through architecture.

Instead of:

“How do I do X in C#?”

the conversation can become:

“I’m trying to accomplish X. Here is how the system currently works. What would be a good way to implement this without breaking Y?”

That’s a very different tool.

And for someone who jumps between C#, Rust, JavaScript, C++, game development and whatever random thing I’ve decided to build this week, it’s incredibly useful.

But I Don’t Want AI to Think for Me

This is where I’ve personally tried to draw the line.

I want AI to help me develop software.

I don’t want it to become the developer.

There’s a huge difference between:

“Explain why this Rust lifetime is causing a problem.”

and:

“Build my entire application.”

The first one potentially makes me better.

The second one can very quickly turn into owning a giant pile of code I don’t completely understand.

And eventually something is going to break.

When that happens, the AI isn’t the person responsible for fixing the production system.

I am.

I Still Search for Things

AI also hasn’t completely replaced Google, documentation, GitHub issues, Reddit, Stack Overflow, or any of the other places developers find information.

Sometimes I want the official documentation.

Sometimes I want to see how other developers solved something.

Sometimes I want to know whether a library has an actual bug.

Sometimes I want to read the discussion behind a decision.

And sometimes Stack Overflow still has exactly the answer I need.

The difference is that it isn’t necessarily my first stop anymore.

For a very long time, it was.

Programming Has Always Been About Using Tools

Every generation of developers has had tools that made programming easier.

Books.

Documentation.

Forums.

Google.

Stack Overflow.

IntelliSense.

Stack Overflow again.

Seriously, a lot of Stack Overflow.

Then GitHub.

Then Copilot.

Then ChatGPT and the explosion of AI coding assistants.

The tools change.

The job doesn’t.

You still need to understand the problem.

You still need to make architectural decisions.

You still need to debug things.

You still need to recognize when the solution you’re looking at is complete nonsense.

And maybe that’s one of the most important skills AI makes even more valuable.

Thanks, Stack Overflow

I don’t use Stack Overflow nearly as much as I once did.

That’s strange to think about considering how important it was throughout my career.

There was a time when having Stack Overflow open while programming felt almost as normal as having the IDE open.

It helped me solve countless problems.

It taught me things.

It occasionally sent me down completely incorrect rabbit holes.

It introduced me to answers beginning with:

“You shouldn’t do this, but…”

Which, naturally, meant I was absolutely going to do it.

And it was always there when I copied some horrifying exception into Google at 2 AM hoping another developer somewhere had already suffered through the same problem.

Today I have AI sitting beside me while I code.

But before AI…

Stack Overflow was my Copilot.