Twenty-three years of writing code teaches you something about the stories we tell ourselves when things break. You've seen it ... The production incident that wakes everyone up at 3 AM. The cryptic error that nobody can explain. The Slack channel lighting up with alerts and confusion. And then, like clockwork, the explanation surfaces: "I got this from Stack Overflow." That phrase carried weight. It was supposed to be absolution. The code worked somewhere else ... on the internet, in a different context, for a different problem. How was anyone supposed to know it wouldn't work here? Copy without reading. Skip the context. Ship it. When it breaks, blame the source. I've watched this play out for over two decades. Junior developers ... or honestly, anyone who didn't fully understand an issue ... would go to Stack Overflow, find a solution that seemed to work, paste it in, and move on. They didn't really understand what they'd copied. They didn't trace the logic. They didn't consider the edge cases.…