In my first year as a developer, Stack Overflow was my constant companion. Every non-trivial problem sent me there first — how to format a date, how to deduplicate an array, how to handle a specific CSS edge case. The answers were usually good, and copy-pasting them saved me time I didn't have. But sometime in 2020, I noticed that I was visiting Stack Overflow less frequently, and when I did visit, I was often checking my own solution against the accepted answer rather than looking for a solution to copy. That shift — from seeking answers to verifying my own — was the most reliable signal I'd found that I was transitioning from junior to mid-level, and it happened so gradually that I almost missed it.

The reason I stopped copy-pasting wasn't that I'd memorized every answer. It was that I'd developed enough understanding of the underlying concepts to derive solutions myself. When you understand how JavaScript's array methods work, you don't need to look up how to deduplicate an array — you reach for `filter` or `Set` because you understand what they do. When you understand CSS's box model, you don't need to look up how to center a div — you know which properties to use because you understand the layout model. The Stack Overflow answers were scaffolding that helped me build while I was still learning the foundations, and as the foundations solidified, the scaffolding became less necessary.

That's not to say I stopped using Stack Overflow entirely — I still look things up regularly, and I still learn from answers written by people who understand things better than I do. But the nature of the visits changed: instead of "I don't know how to do this, let me find the answer," it became "I think this is how to do this, let me verify" or "I know how to do this, but let me see if there's a better approach." That shift from dependence to verification is, I think, one of the most meaningful markers of growth as a developer, and it's worth pausing to notice when it happens.