Do people actually just copy paste? When I was much greener I never found that to work. The interface had to be thought about. And inevitably there’d be other details to modify.

If anything this just makes that easier to do wrongly. It wants to offer you code that’s not yours that you didn’t conceive of thoughtfully.

IMHO its worse because on StackOverflow, people can comment, upvote/downvote, add their own answers etc if the random code has issues or shortcomings or is a bad idea for whatever reason. With copilot, you have to trust it or trust that you can figure out if there are issues (which, if you're a beginner learning, you probably can't and according to that security articleq[1], in many cases even experienced programmers may not notice[2]). With StackOverflow, that's also the case, except you have many more eyes vetting it.

[1] https://gist.github.com/0xabad1dea/be18e11beb2e12433d93475d7...

[2] Two quotes from the article: "Oh, and they're both wrong." and "Both look plausibly correct at a glance". If the entire selling point is to write code faster, are we really going to give the code more than a glance? Personally, I find figuring out code I didn't write a lot harder than writing it from scratch, in most cases, because I understand my intent, while I don't understand the intent of others without some deep thinking.

It isn’t really being sold as “are you the kind of developer who copies and pastes code you don’t understand from StackOverflow? The have we got an efficiency improvement for you!”

I can't say copy pasting has ever worked from me for stack overflow, unless it's something really rudimentary and I just want a quick example.