Let me ask you something uncomfortable: When was the last time you wrote a piece of code entirely from memory, without checking Stack Overflow, without asking an AI, without peeking at that old project where you solved something similar? Last week? Last month? Or are you sitting there thinking, "Wait, people actually do that?"
Here's the thing nobody wants to admit at stand-up meetings or in performance reviews: most of us spend a significant chunk of our development time copying, adapting, and frankensteining code from various sources, crossing our fingers, running the tests, and hoping the damn thing works. And you know what? Sometimes I wonder if that's not just normal—maybe it's actually how software development has always worked, and we've just been too proud or too scared to say it out loud.
But let's sit with this discomfort for a minute. Are we problem solvers or professional code assemblers? Are we engineers or just really good at Google searches? And more importantly—does it actually matter?
The Uncomfortable Truth About How We Actually Code
Picture this: It's 2 AM. You're three coffees deep. There's a bug that makes absolutely no sense—the kind that makes you question whether you ever understood programming at all. So you copy the error message, paste it into Google, and land on a Stack Overflow answer from 2015. You don't fully understand why it works. You don't even fully understand the problem. But you copy the solution, modify it slightly to fit your context, run it, and... it works. You commit. You push. You go to bed feeling like an impostor.
Sound familiar?
Now here's the question: Did you just solve a problem or did you just get lucky with someone else's solution? And here's the follow-up that really stings: What's the difference?
We've created this mythology around the "real programmer"—someone who understands every line they write, who could rebuild their entire stack from scratch, who never needs to look anything up because they've memorized the documentation. But have you ever met this person? I haven't. And I've worked with people at FAANG companies, at startups burning through VC money, at agencies churning out client work. You know what they all had in common? They all copied code.
The senior engineer with 15 years of experience? She's copying code from her own previous projects because why reinvent the wheel when you've already built a perfectly good wheel three years ago? The fresh bootcamp grad? He's copying from tutorials and YouTube videos because that's literally how he learned. The CTO? He's probably using an entire boilerplate repository that someone else built because he's got a board meeting in four hours and needs to show progress.
Why Do We Copy So Much Code Anyway?
Let's be brutally honest about the economics of software development. You're not being paid to understand the theoretical underpinnings of every algorithm you use. You're being paid to ship features, fix bugs, and keep the product running. When the PM says "we need this authentication flow by Friday," nobody is expecting you to implement OAuth 2.0 from first principles. They're expecting you to integrate Auth0 or Firebase or whatever, which means... copying code from the documentation.
Is this lazy? Or is this literally the job?
Think about it this way: A carpenter doesn't forge their own hammer from raw iron. They use the best hammer they can find and focus on building the thing they're supposed to build. But somehow in programming, we've convinced ourselves that using pre-made tools (which is literally what copying working code is) makes us less legitimate. Why?
Maybe it's because programming still has this hangover from when it was a more academic pursuit. Or maybe it's because we can see each other's work—every commit, every line—in a way that other professions can't. A writer can use common phrases and story structures without anyone knowing. A designer can use established patterns. But a developer? Your "inspired by Stack Overflow" solution is right there in the git history.
And let's talk about the sheer impossibility of knowing everything. JavaScript frameworks alone change faster than most people change their passwords. Are you supposed to deeply understand React, Vue, Angular, Svelte, the new framework that just dropped last Tuesday, plus all the backend languages, plus DevOps, plus databases, plus... you see where I'm going? The surface area of modern software development is absurd. Copying code isn't a moral failing—it's a survival strategy.
But Here's Where It Gets Complicated
Okay, so copying code is normal, rational, maybe even necessary. But we all know there's a difference between intelligently adapting a solution and blindly pasting code you don't understand into production. Right? Right?
Let me tell you about a junior dev I worked with—bright, eager, fast learner. He was tasked with implementing file uploads. He found a code snippet, copied it, and it worked perfectly in development. Shipped to production. Within two days, we had users uploading gigabyte-sized files that were being loaded entirely into memory, crashing the server. The code he copied had a disclaimer in the comments: "Note: This is a simple example and not suitable for production use." He'd deleted the comments because they looked messy.
So here's the uncomfortable question: Whose fault was that? His, for copying code he didn't understand? Mine, for not reviewing more carefully? The tutorial author, for not making the warning more prominent? Or is this just the inevitable result of a system that demands we move fast and break things?
When does copying code cross from "efficient reuse of proven solutions" into "dangerous negligence"? When you copy code without reading it? Without testing it? Without understanding what it does? Or is it only dangerous when something actually breaks?
I've seen developers spend three days building something from scratch "the right way" when a well-understood library could have solved it in an hour. I've also seen developers import dependencies with known vulnerabilities because they copied an npm install command without checking what they were actually installing. Both of these things are bad. But we only shame one of them.
The AI Elephant in the Room
And now we have GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude (hi!), and a dozen other AI tools that have turned "copying code" into an industrial process. You don't even need to find the code anymore—just describe what you want and watch the autocomplete magic happen.
Is this making us better developers or worse ones? And isn't that exactly the same question people asked about Stack Overflow? And IDEs with autocomplete before that? And high-level languages before that?
I use AI coding tools. A lot. And I can't decide if I feel efficient or guilty about it. When an AI writes a perfect regex for me (because who actually remembers regex syntax?), am I programming or am I just... prompting? When it generates a function that does exactly what I need, have I solved a problem or delegated it?
Here's what makes it weird: The AI is often copying too. It's been trained on millions of repositories, Stack Overflow answers, tutorials. So when Copilot suggests code, it's essentially serving you a statistically likely amalgamation of how other people have solved similar problems. It's copying code to help you copy code. It's copies all the way down.
And yet—the code works. The tests pass. The feature ships. The users are happy. So what exactly is the problem?
Maybe the problem is that we're uncomfortable with how much of programming is pattern matching rather than pure creativity. We want to be artists, but most days we're more like skilled assemblers working with pre-fabricated components. And AI is forcing us to confront that reality in ways that are hard to ignore.
Learning vs. Shipping: The Eternal Struggle
Here's where the copying question gets deeply personal: If you're always copying solutions, are you actually learning? Or are you just building a career on a foundation of other people's understanding?
I think about this every time I use a solution I don't fully understand. Part of me thinks: "I should stop and learn this properly." Another part thinks: "The feature needs to ship, and I can learn it later." Guess which voice usually wins?
But then I wonder—is "learning it properly" even possible? Do the people who wrote the original solution fully understand it? Did they copy parts of it from somewhere else? Is there anyone, anywhere, who understands the entire stack from hardware to UI, or is it all just layers of abstraction built on layers of code that somebody else wrote?
A junior developer once asked me: "How do I know when I'm ready to stop copying and start creating?" And I didn't have a good answer. Because the honest truth is: You never stop copying. You just get better at knowing what to copy, how to adapt it, and when you actually need to understand the internals versus when you can treat something as a black box.
The difference between a junior and senior developer isn't that seniors write everything from scratch—it's that seniors know which things they copied are safe to treat as dependencies and which ones are ticking time bombs. They've been burned enough times to develop intuition about what "works on my machine" code smells like.
But is that wisdom or just scar tissue?
The Myth of Writing Everything From Scratch
Let's do a thought experiment. Imagine you're building a web application without using any external code. No frameworks. No libraries. No code you didn't write yourself.
You'd need to implement: HTTP protocol handling, routing, templating, database drivers, SQL parsing, authentication, session management, password hashing, CSRF protection, input validation, XSS prevention, JSON parsing, error handling, logging, maybe websockets, probably some async operations...
You see where this is going? By the time you finished building all that infrastructure, the startup you were working for would be dead, the problem you were solving would be irrelevant, and you'd be explaining to your landlord why you couldn't pay rent because you were "doing things the right way."
Writing everything from scratch isn't noble—it's usually just inefficient. We stand on the shoulders of giants not because we're lazy, but because we'd be idiots not to. The entire point of abstraction, of libraries, of frameworks, is so that we don't have to solve the same problems over and over again.
But here's the paradox: If nobody ever wrote code from scratch, there would be nothing to copy. Someone had to write Express.js. Someone had to write React. Someone is writing the code that you'll be copying five years from now.
So maybe the question isn't "Should I copy code?" but rather "Should I sometimes be the person writing the code that others copy?" And if so, when? How do you know if you're at that level? What if you're not?
When Copying Becomes Cargo Culting
There's a term from anthropology that developers love to use: cargo culting. It comes from indigenous peoples who, after seeing planes deliver cargo during WWII, built imitation runways hoping planes would come to them too. They copied the form without understanding the function.
We do this all the time in programming. We see a successful company using microservices, so we use microservices—never mind that we have three users and two developers. We see someone using Redux for state management, so we add Redux—even though our app is so simple that props would work fine. We copy the patterns of success without understanding why they were successful.
But here's my question: How do you know you're cargo culting? When you're copying a pattern that works at Google, how do you know whether it'll work for your ten-person startup, or whether you're just building a runway in the jungle?
I've seen teams spend months implementing patterns they copied from tech blogs, only to rip them all out later because they were solving problems the team didn't actually have. I've also seen teams avoid proven patterns because they seemed "too complex," only to painfully rediscover why those patterns exist in the first place.
The uncomfortable truth is that sometimes you can't know until you try. And sometimes the only way to learn why a pattern exists is to not use it and suffer the consequences.
The Impostor Syndrome Question
Let's talk about the thing nobody wants to admit: When you spend your day copying and adapting code, it's really easy to feel like a fraud. Especially when you see other developers confidently explaining concepts you barely understand, or when you interview for a job and can't whiteboard a binary search from memory even though you've shipped ten production features this month.
Is the impostor syndrome justified? Are we actually impostors?
I don't know. Some days I feel like a competent professional who knows how to effectively use available resources. Other days I feel like I'm one tough interview question away from being exposed as someone who just got really good at Google searches.
But here's what I've noticed: The developers who feel most like impostors are often the ones shipping the most code. The ones who are paralyzed by impostor syndrome are often the ones who won't copy anything because they feel like they should understand it all first. Meanwhile, the actually incompetent developers often have no impostor syndrome at all—they're too clueless to realize they're copying dangerous code.
So maybe impostor syndrome is just a sign that you're aware of the gap between what you know and what there is to know? Maybe it's healthy? Or maybe I'm just rationalizing my own insecurity. I honestly can't tell.
Is Programming Creative at All?
Here's a philosophical rabbit hole: If so much of programming is assembling existing solutions in slightly new configurations, is it creative work at all? Or is it more like... really complex plumbing?
Artists don't copy paintings and change a few colors. Musicians don't just replay existing songs with different instruments (well, cover bands do, but that's kind of my point). Writers create original stories. But programmers? We're constantly reassembling the same components in different arrangements.
Or am I wrong about this? Maybe programming is more like cooking—yes, you're using existing ingredients and maybe even following recipes, but the combination, the timing, the adjustments you make, that's where the creativity lives? A chef doesn't feel bad about using the same techniques as other chefs. They're not out there inventing new ways to boil water.
But then why do we feel bad about copying code?
Maybe it's because we've internalized this idea that programming is supposed to be this pure intellectual pursuit, when really it's mostly engineering—which has always been about using proven solutions and combining them in new ways. Civil engineers don't reinvent the arch every time they build a bridge.
The Corporate Pressure Reality
Let's be real about something: The reason most of us copy code is because we don't have a choice. Not really.
When your sprint is packed with fourteen story points, three bugs, and that "quick favor" for the VP that somehow became your problem, you're not spending three days implementing your own authentication system. You're copying the Auth0 quickstart guide and moving on.
When the CEO wants the feature yesterday, when the users are complaining, when the servers are on fire, when the startup is six months from running out of money—nobody cares about your journey to deeply understand OAuth flows. They care about whether the thing works.
So we optimize for shipping. We copy what works. We move fast and hope we don't break too many things. And then we feel bad about it when we're alone with our thoughts at 2 AM.
Is this sustainable? Probably not. Does anyone have a better solution? Not really. The same companies that pressure you to ship features rapidly also want you to write clean, well-understood, thoroughly tested code. They want you to move fast and be careful. They want you to innovate and use best practices. It's contradictory and exhausting.
And copying code is how we try to square that circle—we're using proven solutions (safe!) implemented quickly (fast!). Until we copy the wrong thing and everything breaks (oops!).
So What Actually Matters?
After all this rambling, all these questions, what's the actual answer? Should we copy code or not?
I think the answer is: It depends. And you need to develop the judgment to know when.
Copy the boilerplate. Copy the standard solutions to standard problems. Copy the authentication flow, the API integration, the database setup. Don't waste your creativity on problems that have been solved a thousand times.
But understand what you're copying. Not necessarily how it works at the bit-manipulation level, but what it does, what assumptions it makes, what could go wrong. Treat copied code like a dependency—you need to trust it, or at least understand the risks of using it.
And sometimes, yeah, write things from scratch. Not because copying is cheating, but because that's how you learn. That's how you build the understanding that lets you know what's safe to copy and what isn't.
The real skill isn't writing code from scratch or perfectly copying existing solutions—it's knowing which approach serves the situation. Sometimes you need to dig deep and really understand something. Sometimes you need to ship and you can treat something as a black box. The developers who figure out which is which are the ones who survive.
The Questions I'm Still Sitting With
Are we problem solvers or solution assemblers? Maybe both. Maybe the line between those things was always blurrier than we wanted to admit.
Is copying code making us worse developers? Maybe for some of us. But it's also letting us build things that would have been impossible for individual developers twenty years ago.
Should we feel bad about using AI to write code? I don't know. Ask me again in five years when we see what kind of developers this generation of AI-assisted coding produces.
Is there anyone out there who actually writes everything from scratch, or are we all just pretending? I think we're all pretending, but some of us are pretending harder than others.
What even is "real programming" anymore? Is it the ability to build things, or the ability to understand things? Are they the same? Can you do one without the other?
I don't have clean answers. Nobody does. Anyone who tells you they do is either lying or hasn't thought about it hard enough.
What I do know is this: We're all copying code. The juniors, the seniors, the architects, the CTOs. We're all standing on shoulders, borrowing solutions, adapting patterns, hoping it works. Some of us are just more honest about it.
The question isn't whether you copy code. It's whether you're learning anything while you do it. Whether you're building judgment. Whether you're getting better at knowing what you don't know.
Are you?
Top comments (0)