>Unless it was common enough to show up in a well formed question on stack exchange, it was pretty much impossible

sorry but if you've gone to university, in particular at a time when internet access was already ubiquitous, surely you must have been capable to find an answer to a programming problem by consulting documentation, manual, or tutorials which exist on almost any topic.

I'm not saying the chatbot interface is necessarily bad, it might be more engaging, but it literally does not present you with information you couldn't have found yourself.

If someone has a computer science degree and tells me without stack exchange they can't find solutions to basic problems that is a red flag. That's like the article about the people posted here who couldn't program when their LLM credits ran out