"AI" helps the people who rely on Stack Overflow to do their jobs. Then they come to HN and worry that we will all be out of jobs soon. The problem it solves is "I don't actually know what I am doing at all". These people are not a threat to anyone competent and no amount of questionable code generated by "AI" will change that.
It sounds like you have the luxury of working in a narrow environment, single language in one layer of the stack. I've had that experience to where I can memorize all of the relevant APIs, and code idioms by working in a single area. Many find ourselves working across the stack working in many languages to develop a solution. It is not humanly possible to have knowledge of all of the APIs and idioms at your fingertips. This is where a tool like GPT is incredibly valuable. I believe this is the future of the software profession. Having deep knowledge of software architecture and being able to develop a solution that employs several languages and frameworks.
There are workflows that dont include stackoverflow at all, like mine, usually.
If I need to know how to convert a u32 to little endian bytes in Rust, for example, my first instinct isnt to go to SO or chatgpt, my first instinct is usually to go to the docs and search for it. Or just try it out in an IDE. u23::to and hitting tab did the trick, so now I can click on that and read the in-source docs. Same for C++, C, bash, anything that has docs or manpages.
I use stackoverflow for problems like "i have this error and it doesnt tell me whats wrong", like "exception in docker-compose like 3, . missing resource ID" -- i need SO to tell me that this means I dont have an image-name.
It's not that I never reference Stack Overflow; it is just not frequent. I actually know my tools fairly well and most corporate development work simply isn't challenging. I also use vim with nothing but syntax highlighting.
