Gen Z needs a knowledge base (and so do you)

Gen Z needs a knowledge base (and so do you) - Stack Overflow

Stack Overflow Business Stack Internal: the knowledge intelligence layer that powers enterprise AI.Stack Data Licensing: decades of verified, technical knowledge to boost AI performance and trust.Stack Ads: engage developers where it matters — in their daily workflow.It’s hard to escape the ubiquity of AI tools when you’re a person who uses the internet. It is doubly hard to escape when you’re a young person glued to your phone for most of the day. In a surprise to no one, people aged 14-29 spend the most hours a day looking at a screen (by a large margin, I might add). Recently, TD reported that 90% of Zoomers are using AI tools in 2026, a sharp increase from the 76% reported in Deloitte's 2025 survey. Our own Stack research on learning and AI corroborated this data, finding that 67% of early career developers use AI tools daily in their work. That’s 13% more than in 2025, and 10% more than the cross-generational average.With so much time spent staring at lighted pixels on their handheld electric boxes, the fact that Gen Z’s AI usage is skyrocketing probably doesn’t make you gasp in shock. But the numbers don’t paint the most flattering picture of my generation, especially as those numbers continue to increase so starkly year over year. Although Gen Z is proficient at knowledge discovery via the wealth of instantaneous search tools at our disposal, what Gen Z is not so great at is knowledge retention. Finding an answer is one thing, but remembering it over the long term is another. Neuroscientists are finding Gen Z is cognitively disadvantaged compared to older generations.And while I’m the first to argue that not all AI usage is bad, many of the effects of prolonged AI usage aren’t great. My fellow Stack writer Ryan Donovan recently reported on the growing body of research about the negative effects of letting your AI agent think for you—what smart people are calling “cognitive offloading.” This cognitive offloading distorts our perceptions of reality, cedes agency and decision-making to bots, and outsources ethical and moral judgements to training data. Basically, it’s a bad idea to let AI do your thinking for you. Combined with my generation's declining attention span and lowered ability to retain knowledge, AI tools for learning create a compounding negative effect on people my age that we’ll probably be digging ourselves out of for the rest of our lives.This all becomes increasingly ominous when you remember AI’s non-determinism often leads to incorrect or misleading information. It’s no secret that trust in AI has declined, even as adoption has increased. It seems the more we use these tools, the more sure we are that they aren’t always right. Gen Z feels this wariness as much as anyone, yet we still use these tools daily. Part of this is that AI tools are easy—and I will only speak for myself, but I’m Gen Z and sometimes I get really lazy—but the other part is that my generation feels more compelled to use AI than any other generation, if only to get an edge in a fierce and rapidly disappearing entry-level job market.We’ve created a culture ripe for cognitive offloading, holding our young people to increasingly high standards during their schooling before punting them straight into a job market without room for them. For Zoomers, using AI tools may be the only way to get an edge in a society that demands high performance without always rewarding it. We have to be bigger, better, faster, stronger if we want to be considered for work, offering provable value from day one that outweighs what an AI could do in our place. So even if we don’t trust the chatbots, we sort of have to trust the chatbots.We can hardly forecast positive outcomes for the future of technology—and the world, honestly—when our youngest workers are in active brain atrophy, and getting all their knowledge from chatbots they don’t even trust. So what do we do? It’s been said a million times, but if you have no junior developers now, you’ll someday have no senior developers. Fostering the talent of the future means writing documentation, curating resources, and offering work experience. But these are all things we readily and progressively outsource to AI. How will the next generation of tech workers learn if the only ones willing to teach them are chatbots?And what can Gen Z do to create the neural pathways necessary for long-term wisdom and knowledge while still getting the positive benefits out of AI that can feel like a prerequisite for competitiveness in the shrinking early-career job market?I think the answer to both of these questions is the same: a knowledge base.Stop Gen Z staring at TikTok and start Gen Z staring at your knowledge baseWhat is a knowledge base? In simple terms, it’s a central repository of knowledge. You can think of it as a sort of living library of all the information you know and might need someday, kept in one place for easy reference and long-term access. Stack Overflow is an example of a public knowledge base for everything you might want to know about software development, and our enterprise product Stack Internal is an example of a private, internal knowledge base that houses just the particular knowledge of a company.But not every knowledge base needs to be collaborative or about a central, cohesive topic. My personal knowledge base has things like Stack’s brand guidelines, notes from my film projects, sewing patterns I want to try someday, and even a record of updates made to my apartment lease. What’s important about my own knowledge base is that I’ve written down, catalogued, and organized all of the information I’ve collected over the years into one place that I can easily search and reference.The most important thing I do with my knowledge base, and what I believe will have lasting positive effects on my cognition and learning, is write notes about the things I learn. For a long time, we’ve known that humans of all ages are bad at remembering information. They even have a model for it in psychology, called the Forgetting Curve, that shows the steep drop-off in information retention humans have when that information is not actively reinforced. Basically, we lose 50% of new information we learn in an hour, and the rest of it in a week. This is bad news for anyone trying to learn anything ever.Luckily, there are plenty of ways to reinforce learning so you don’t forget about it. Notetaking is usually the first step, followed by reviewing, quizzing, and summarizing. Often, you have to repeat these steps over and over in order for things to really stick, which is why you probably had to take so many exams in school. When you’re out of school, though, it’s easy to lose these kinds of habits in favor of the easiest thing, which is just to look stuff up when you need to know it.But looking stuff up isn’t actually learning. You probably don’t need to burn into your memory how many gold medals the women’s US hockey team has won, so it’s OK to just look that kind of stuff up via a search bar or a chatbot. But what about GDPR data protections? Or best practices for REST API design? Or debugging common errors in C++? Or must-have security measures in your code?If you’re asking for a step-by-step guide from a chatbot every time you need this information, or just sending an AI agent to do it for you, you’re cognitively offloading. An hour later, you’ll have forgotten 50% of what the bot taught you. A week later, you won’t remember any of it.While the days of skimming textbooks and digging through pages of search results are gone, thus making the search and discovery part of active learning increasingly obsolete, active learning as a whole is still very possible with modern technology. This is where your knowledge base comes in.For people my age, we have to make the active effort to reinforce and practice the knowledge given to us by AI tools. The anchor point for this is notetaking. And I mean active notetaking, by the way: no copy-paste of large pieces of text, or rewriting them verbatim from what you're reading. To keep your knowledge base manageable and actually learn a thing or two from what you’re consuming, you have to sort through the noise and record what you actually care about in your own words.That’s part of the beauty of a personal knowledge base—if you want it to actually be useful, you have to curate and organize. You have to actively engage with it, otherwise the mess of information you’re leaving for your future self makes the knowledge base useless. Not everything you read from a Stack Overflow Q&A is going to be useful to you in the long term, so you have to make the effort to sort through the noise and write down the things that might actually be. The same can be said of answers from GenAI—so much of it is useless, sycophantic pitter-patter that clogs up your knowledge base when included. Learn to cut the crap and keep only the stuff that matters in your knowledge base.Then use what you wrote down—not the answer from the AI—to complete your task. Afterwards, write down a few notes about what you did and where you hit obstacles in the task. Doing this will reinforce and actualize the things you were taught by the AI, helping you retain the information past the dreaded first week of the forgetting curve. Next time you need those answers, return to your knowledge base; afterwards, write a little about what was actually useful from your original notes and what new things you learned. Keep returning to your notes and updating them until you’ve mastered the learning. Every time you do this, you’re reinforcing the learning you got from the AI chatbot, making it a thing you actually know how to do and not something you just cognitively offload to AI. Now we’re really cooking.But this still doesn’t answer what we should do about AI’s non-determinism feeding young people misleading or totally incorrect information. We simply cannot ask young people to rely solely on AI to learn, even if they are learning