Stack Overflow Makes You Feel Stupid. ChatGPT Makes You Feel Brilliant. One of Them Is Lying.

Developers once feared Stack Overflow’s judgment. Now they trust ChatGPT’s confidence. But what happens when AI makes you feel right and you’re still wrong? A brutally honest story about coding, ego, and misplaced trust.

I still remember my first Stack Overflow question.
It was just a harmless TypeScript error a tiny function that refused to behave. I spent hours debugging it, gave up, and finally crafted what I thought was a perfect post: formatted code, clear title, polite tone, version numbers, everything.
I hit submit.
Two minutes later:

“Duplicate.”
“Too broad.”
“Did you even read the docs?”

It felt less like asking for help and more like being publicly shamed for existing.
No answer. Three downvotes. One existential crisis.

Recently, I copied the exact same question into ChatGPT. It replied like a calm senior engineer who actually cares about your mental health.

“Ah, I see the issue. TypeScript’s type inference isn’t flowing through your higher-order function. Try this…”

function withLogger<T>(fn: (arg: T) => void) {
  return (arg: T) => {…