I get the joke.

But if, like me, you actually feel this here's how I got away from it: make sure you actually understand things.

Read the error message over and over again, look up the words, understand what it is saying.

If something isn't working, start reading the code and making sure you understand what each line is doing.

It will feel incredibly slow and painful at first. Eventually you will strengthen those.muscles, however, and it'll become second nature.

Then you can cut and paste with confidence! 🤣

It’s all imposter syndrome, all the way down

Get a pro GPT subscription and command it to copy paste for you of course

The real developer has been inside you all along!

To become a real programmer, you must install Copilot and let it copy and paste for you.

I feel like most of my googling of simple code is because I know what I'm trying to do, but I don't remember the correct function name and or language structure for the language I'm currently using.

Funny, I've been in my current support/devops role for 9 years and every year I wonder more what the hell I'm doing. It somehow seems like I get dumber/lose knowledge/the field expands much more rapidly than my broken mind can keep up with.

I feel like a glorified script kiddie most of the time. I couldn't program my way out of a wet paper bag if my life depended on it.

Wait, that's a thing??? I can earn programmer money just by using copy & paste??? Maybe it's time I changed jobs...

Real answer, learn how to paste several code snippets from stack overflow into a ChatGPT window and ask it to do what you need. Sprinkle in some copilot to tweak as needed. Congrats, Mr Programmer.

It's like that person who thought they'd found a cheat code called Google.

Honestly, I hate these memes. As an old school hacker/programmer who has been doing this for many decades, I can usually just start thinking in code and start dumping out everything I need from my brain through my fingers to the keyboard. I never copy-and-paste code from online for something I’m coding (I don’t count something like copying a script to do a quick shell task of some-sort; for something like Amazon’s directions for installing Corretto I’m not going to type all that out manually; and I don’t really consider that “programming”).

But as a tech manager (and former University comp.sci instructor), I know this happens more often than I’d prefer. But some of the worst code I’ve had to review has been copy-and-paste jobs where the developer didn’t understand the task correctly and jammed in something they found online as a quick solution. I get that I started in a generation where you had to understand the problem and code the solution from scratch (because the Internet crutch wasn’t what it is today) — but the fact that so many younger developers revel in the fact they copy-and-paste code on the regular makes me sad.

read the code and pretend you understand it (real understanding will slowly come with that)

Depends on the language. I'm not gonna find shit to copy-paste for what I'm doing in Scala 3 or F#, but in Rust or C++ I'll frequently Google an issue I can't figure out and someone will have some fancy black magic hacker solution with super-iterators and turbofishies and weird type inference that I couldn't think of myself and just throw it in my code with some minor modifications :)

I’ve been professionally programming for 18 years now. And honestly, I hate writing code from scratch. I copy/paste code from other parts of my codebase and just tweak as needed. Writing code from scratch feels like I’m doing something wrong.

You tell him "stop giving away our secrets!"

And yeah, a lot of people in the comments are running away from the joke, but realistically, to copy+paste code and have it work, you generally have to have a grasp of the code, at least to ask what you want and to paste it and change the variable names, and write the lines to stitch it all together.

Add imposter syndrome on top of that, and it may seem like you don't do anything of use because you copied 3 functions out of a 1k line file.