Comment StackOverflow is part of the problem (Score 2) 220
StackOverflow has been a source of terrible coding advice and overreliance on copypasta by juniors for far longer than ML has been a problem. Junior engineers have been woefully deficient in actual coding ability for (at least) the better part of a decade. No one ever reads the manual for anything, reads source code or even api interfaces, or does anything to actually understand anything about the art of actual software engineering as applied to the problems they are trying to solve. They just google search a link to an SO post and blindly copy and paste some code that is at least marginally related to the problem at hand, then rejigger things to make that solution do something useful and move on, often without testing or even attempting to understand what the code they just added even does. Now they do the same thing to ML-generated code, an outcome which I can't even tell is worse or better. At least an ML query is a firsthand answer instead of just the 4th most upvoted answer to someone else's marginally relevant question. Instead, it is a firsthand answer by an ML model that has been trained on the 4th most upvoted answer to everyone else's totally irrelevant questions.
I can't wait to see how the phenomenon evolves once enough of the code that is out there to use for training new models is itself generated by ML models. We think incest is problematic when procreating biologically...I can't wait to see what it does to incestuously generated ML offspring.