I write pretty decent code and can do without copying and pasting alot of times. But the reason I use google to find answers is simply this; I always try to find the most gracious solutions and best practices to solve my problems. There are many ways to get around any one problem, but some have higher security risks. The comment section in stackoverflow and other forums help me weigh the pros and cons. Am not sure this will go down well in PHP development. Especially because alot of newbie code is out there. But for a language like ruby, I think this is a safe practice.