Vent: Copy-pasting Stack Overflow code cost me 6 hours of debugging

I was building a simple login form (my first real project) and found a code snippet on Stack Overflow that looked perfect. Pasted it in, changed the variable names, and it worked for like 2 minutes. Then boom - the whole thing crashed every time I tried to submit. Turns out the snippet had a hidden infinite loop in a useEffect hook that I didn't even read through. I spent 6 hours reading docs and testing line by line before I spotted the issue. Now I force myself to rewrite every snippet I copy, even if I have to Google each function. Has anyone else gotten burned by trusting a popular answer too fast?

2 comments

2 Comments

simonp4716d ago

You ever notice how the most upvoted answers on Stack Overflow are often 5+ years old and might not even work with the latest version of a library anymore? That's how I got bit by a deprecated React pattern that looked "correct" because thousands of people had voted it up. Now I always scroll to the bottom to check for recent comments saying "this no longer works in version X.

the_ray16d ago

Heard a podcast recently where the host said Stack Overflow is basically a museum of code now. You search for something, and the top result is from 2015 with 2,000 upvotes, but it's for a library version that's been dead for years. That's your exact point @simonp47 about the React pattern. I've started adding the date to any snippet I copy from there. If it's older than 2 years, I assume it's broken until proven otherwise. The voting system just makes it worse because old answers get buried under new ones that actually work.