Pro tip: Stop copy-pasting code you don't understand

I see it ALL the time in this sub, people grab a script from a forum and glue it into their project without reading a single line. Last week a guy posted a login form that had a SQL injection hole big enough to drive a truck through, and he had no clue because he copied it from a 2015 Stack Overflow answer. If you can't explain what each loop and function does, you're not coding, you're just assembling blind. I've been roofing for 12 years and I wouldn't trust a guy who nails shingles without knowing why the felt goes down first. Take the extra 20 minutes to type it out line by line and test each piece. Has anyone else had a bug that took two days to fix because you didn't know what someone else's code was actually doing inside? What's the worst copy-paste disaster you've cleaned up in your own projects?

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avery_stone951mo ago

My buddy spent a whole weekend debugging a plugin, turns out the copy-paste had a single wrong character buried in it.