I realised a seismic, if only personal, shift in how I use the internet when I’m “stuck”.

There was a time when any Google search would lead you to StackOverflow and the massive amount of knowledge it holds.

Now, in a personal project involving Angular, Azure and Cosmos DB, I often need to look things up. But I no longer end up at StackOverflow.

I’m finding that I use JetBrains’ AI coding assistant in their Rider IDE and when that inevitably runs out of credit I switch to Microsoft’s CoPilot.

JetBrains’ AI coding assistant is really good at offering advice, but you as a developer need to guide it and understand how to adapt to your project. Though this adaptation is often minimal.

Once I run out of AI credits, after JetBrains’ realisation that AI costs bigtime and they need to bait and switch their loyal users, I switch to Microsoft’s CoPilot.

Even using the model provided with the Microsoft 365 Family licence, it’s really very good at filling in the gap left by JetBrains’ betrayal.

This is the new norm for developers: find the AI tool that best fits and has least impact on cost, relying on that tool to have scraped, absorbed and effectively relay the knowledge of sites previously used, such as StackOverflow. The question is, how long will that be possible, as we’re potentially barrelling towards an internet future which puts gates in front of AI bots or removes human-facing and pleasing design in preference for providing an AI-first interface.