Kevin Surace argues that programmers have always copied code from Stack Overflow and GitHub, and AI tools are just the next step. He says AI reduces what used to take minutes to seconds, and the backlash against it misses the point: developers have never built everything from scratch.
Programmers have been copying code from the internet for years. So why is AI suddenly a problem? We would go out to the web and what we would do, we'd look for some open source example and then we'd bring that in and then we would modify it for our own use. And we'd say, thank goodness someone wrote an open source routine that talks to this driver. I have no idea how to talk to that dumb driver, for example. And so all we've done is speed up the Stack Overflow process or the GitHub process, right? And made it, you know, 5 seconds or 10 seconds instead of what was an hour. And it is true, you know, before there was a Google, before— if we go back 25, 30 years, there was a time that the only way to interface to that driver was to sit there and poke and try to write some code and maybe call someone at Microsoft. But shortly after Google, then we could search, and this is now making us faster than that. So don't kid yourself, you didn't code everything yourself. Every application we build today has dozens and dozens of open source things in it. Why? Yeah. I don't want to go rebuild that, it works. So we already do this, and we never got mad that we were using open source wherever we could. And now we're mad that an engine writes some of this, including the open source that puts it in the thing. Everybody get over themselves, right?
