About whether Copilot-style tools threaten programmers or are just like Stack Overflow.
Has this happened?
Yes 90 (71%)Not sure 18 (14%)No 19 (15%)
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Hacker News has set AI a lot of challenges over the years. Which ones has it met?
About whether Copilot-style tools threaten programmers or are just like Stack Overflow.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
I totally believe you that Copilot is useful, my contention is that it is useful in the same sense that stackoverflow is useful.
No developer is competing with stackoverflow. These tools are enabling developers to quickly generate code for certain problems, which works especially well for boilerplate. But this isn't actually the main skill of a programmer, it is just some mechanical neccesity to writing software.
Much of what developers do is modifying existing code, fixing bugs, designing architecture and solving novel problems. If an AI could reliably do any of these tasks jobs would be endangered, but certainly that is not the case yet and AI would have to come quite a far way before that.