Copying code and breaking the license is a liability many companies don’t want and therefore block SO when in the office.
I’ve seen upvoted answers to questions around with stuff that purposefully has a backdoor in it (one character away from being a correct answer, so you are vulnerable only if you actually copied and pasted).
I think S.O. Is great, and LLMs too, but any “lead” engineer would try to learn and refute the content.
BTW: my favorite thing to do after an LLM gives a coding answer: now fix the bug.
The answers are hilarious. Oh, I see the security vulnerabilities. Or oh, this won’t work in an asynchronous environment. Etc, etc. Sometimes you have to be specific with the type of bug you spot (looking at you, sonnet 3.7). It’s worth adding to your cursor rules or similar.
All my 24-year career is among 4 “very large” software companies and 1 startup. 3 out of the 4 had a culture of “// https://stackoverflow.com/xxxxx” type comments on top of any piece of code that someone learned about from stackoverflow. There was one where everyone made a big fuss about such things in code reviews. They’ll ask “we don’t have any functions in this project that use this Linux syscall. How do you know this is what needs to be called???” And you had 2 ways of answering. You could link a kernel.org url saying “I looked through Linux sources and learned that to do X you need to call Y api” and everyone would reply “cool”, “great find”, etc. You could also say “I searched for X and found this stackoverflow response” which everyone will reply to as “stackoverflow is often wrong”, “do we have the right license to use that code”, “don’t use stackoverflow”, “please reconsider this code”
> There was one where everyone made a big fuss about such things in code reviews.
There's always dumb morons... sigh.
Even if you don't copy code from SO, it still makes sense to link to it if there is a decent explanation on whatever problem you were facing. When I write code and I hit some issue - particularly if it's some sort of weird ass edge case - I always leave a link to SO, and if it's something that's also known upstream but not fixed yet (common if you use niche stuff), I'll also leave a TODO comment linking to the upstream issue.
Code should not just be code, it should also be a document of knowledge and learning to your next fellow coder who touches the code.
(This also means: FFS do not just link stackoverflow in the git commit history. No one is looking there years later)
Copying code and breaking the license is a liability many companies don’t want and therefore block SO when in the office.
I’ve seen upvoted answers to questions around with stuff that purposefully has a backdoor in it (one character away from being a correct answer, so you are vulnerable only if you actually copied and pasted).
I think S.O. Is great, and LLMs too, but any “lead” engineer would try to learn and refute the content.
BTW: my favorite thing to do after an LLM gives a coding answer: now fix the bug.
The answers are hilarious. Oh, I see the security vulnerabilities. Or oh, this won’t work in an asynchronous environment. Etc, etc. Sometimes you have to be specific with the type of bug you spot (looking at you, sonnet 3.7). It’s worth adding to your cursor rules or similar.