Stack overflow is almost dead
Stack overflow is almost dead
blog.pragmaticengineer.com
Stack overflow is almost dead
Four months ago, we asked Are LLMs making Stack Overflow irrelevant? Data at the time suggested that the answer is likely "yes:"
133 comments
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It's not dead until I stop getting 10 year old outdated answers in my searches!
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I wonder how well LLMs would do without SO's data
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I had a decently awarded account on SO because I joined it in 2012. I asked and answered questions. For the first few years it was fucking awesome as a professional developer. Then it's popularity on google search results ended up making it too well known and the comment quality dropped substantially. Then the fucking powerusers popped up and started flagging almost everye one my questions as duplicates while pointing to unrelated questions. The last I really used SO was around 2017. I got too fed up to participate in the platform because when I spent the time to make a well formed question, it would just got shut down and my time wasted.
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Had the same experience, almost exactly.
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It will endure as long as the LLM's on there know how to misinterpret the question and fire back snarky unhelpful answers about how clueless you are for asking in the first place.
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Stack Overflow hasn't been useful for at least 10 years, if not longer.
The flagged "correct" answer is almost always wrong due to idiotic power-users and the vast horde of idiots who upvote obviously wrong answers because they're bootlickers. The real answer is usually buried in between the posts by gatekeepers, pedants, idiots with something to prove, wannabe admins, egotistical idiots, the highly opinionated technologically insecure, etc ad nauseam. Reddit is just as bad for tech questions, if not worse.
Since I started using LLMs (running on my own inference server) I haven't used anything else for tech questions that wasn't opinion-based. Much, much more useful, and it requires you to think seriously about the problem to come up with a good prompt -- which often gives you the answer before you even finish the prompt.
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This is interesting because a huge amount of AI "knowledge" comes from stack exchange.
Now I'll go read the other comments and article to see if that's already been mentioned :)
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Like it or hate it (personally I prefer the latter, posting there I felt like a middle schooler with a PUNCH ME sticker on my face) it was a great source of indexable data on programming.
I wonder how will this affect future search and llms, now that all similar questions are being asked in private llm threads.
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Sucks because I prefer stack overflow in searches because I get more of a human explanation and wisdom. With llm i have to figure out what it’s_trying to do_ , debug it, and god forbid you want various ways of doing the same thing. I hate LLMs for coding. I hate clients for trying to force me to use it when most of the time now they admit they’re hiring me because AI failed in the first place
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Anyone remember experts-exchange?
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Ah yes, the place that never answered anything.
The sloppiest of slops before we got AI slop.
It was the pinterest of answering stuff
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Or if they had an answer, they paywalled it, until Google got pissed at them for including the answer in their SEO but blocking it once the user clicked through. Then they maliciously complied with Google's demand to not censor by burying the answer under layers upon layers of ads and other "related" questions.
I was so glad to see SO eat their lunch.
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I used it in earnest! (to write shitty VB scripts and PHP websites)
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I remember when it didn't have a dash. Until people started making fun of the old URL...
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So easily avoided too
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My experience with SO is that I'll look up a question about how to do something using X method and all the answers are like "why are you using X?" or "here's how to do it using Y.". You rarely find people answering the questions and instead find people trying to spread gospel about a certain tech that you aren't using.
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Yep, they aggressively XY problem your question until you give up. Also why many questions do not give the answer to the problem what most people asking that question would ask.
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Then the author marks the question as answered because doing Y solves their problem…
Good for you, but I actually need to do X and Y wouldn’t work for me. At least change the title so it doesn’t come up as the top result in search engines.
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This was the majority of my experience as well. As a newer programmer, I'm more than happy to always know a better option. But if the way I'm looking to solve my problem is wrong, don't just give me Y, explain to me why it may not work how I think it will. Tell me about X and some pitfalls or reasoning for it not going to work, then recommend Y. Because if others only see the Y answer to my question about X, they'll probably just keep searching for a solution to X not knowing it may not work like I didn't know.
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I think all that needs to be said is if you search how to install a new CA in a given runtimes cert store, odds are the first and accepted answer will almost without fail describe how to disable ssl.
A lot of times the accepted answer on a locked question will be extremely outdated and/or not even functional anymore.
Modern tech charges at a break neck pace and stack overflow can't keep up because the people who run the community created rules that artificially led to it not keeping up
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That's strange. It's almost never my experience on stack overflow.
What you're describing happens mostly on reddit and lemmy.
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This is honestly the reason why it's going downhill, forcing people to do Y or use Z because of some problem irrelevant to the question being asked.
It limits creativity and depth of discussion on a forum designed to discuss all principles of programming
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My experience with SO is somewhat the same, but sometimes (actually maybe most times) you're trying to use a hammer to screw in a screw.. If you read the suggestions and take them into account you can often find the actual question, and then the actual answer.
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I’ve decided the best way to deal with someone asking an XY question is the following.
- Answer it. I don’t know what this person is doing, maybe they do really need to do some super weird thing and they are 4 weeks deep into “getting this project to work” and they don’t need me giving them the idea they also immediately thought of and can’t do for a bunch of reasons they are too exhausted to go into.
- See if this is an XY problem.
I have found this to be infinitely more well received. I think because by answering the question upfront without any annoying back and forth about why exactly they need to OCR a pdf in JavaScript, they are much more likely to be willing to have a dialog if their immediate question has been met.
The only danger is that some noob might stop reading after the answer and not engage with the deeper design issue, but by gatekeeping the answer behind a “you must convince the council of elders that you are doing something reasonable first” all we’ve done is push those people into ChatGPTs cheery answer first even if you have to make it up hands.
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My experience has been more like this:
OP: I’m trying to make lasagna from scratch but my noodles aren’t turning out right. Here’s my noodle recipe and settings for my pasta machine.
Mod: duplicate post of “How to make canned spaghetti bolognese” thread locked.
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In my experience has been like "that's a bug and was solved on version 2.1, update" and I'm having the exact problem in version 2.2 so what now?
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Or I don't actually get to update the version my company is using, is there a workaround?
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I've been in your position and in the other person's position many times. It can be frustrating but we need to think about the big picture. It's possible you hadn't considered a certain approach, and it's probable that many other future readers will not have considered a certain approach. So even though you might have said that you want to do something specific, it's often helpful to some people to provide general information of another way to tackle the same issue.
And of course you know your own situation, so now there are these comments that appear off topic, and they kind of are, for you, and that's just how it is on forums.
The other situation that comes up a lot is that people are doing it wrong. They are misusing some piece of technology and while their kluge might kind of work right now, it's setting themselves up for bigger issues in the future. Of course no one appreciates it when you tell them they're doing it wrong.
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People don't like when you don't answer their question because it doesn't give them an answer to their question. Just answer the question first and then hop on your high horse to tell them why it's not going to work.
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Make no mistake. LLMs aren’t killing stackoverflow. LLMs just arrived to finish it off. The stuff that was killing it are the regular posters there, and their passive aggressive bullshit
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Yup. I once decided to spend an afternoon answering questions on a framework I was expert in, as a kind of profile-building exercise to help with job hunting, and after around the third smug self-satisfied comment picking me up on some piece of irrelevant bullshit I deleted my account.
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I never asked a question, despite using it daily. Too afraid of being berated 😅
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Nothing passive about them it was just regular aggressive. Made my programming coursework so much worse. Indian guys on YouTube however, now those guys were helpful!
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Question closed as off-topic.
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Question closed as off-topic.
Removed as duplicate of #264826376: "Question closed as duplicate."
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Ever ask a question on SO? I tell my students to search there but never, ever ask a question. The unmitigated hostility is not what new developers need or deserve. ChatGPT won't humiliate you for asking a question that someone else has already asked.
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That's why I only post questions for bleeding-edge languages and code libraries. I have to answer them myself.
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ChatGPT won't humiliate you for asking a question that someone else has already asked.
I don't know, being told what a good question that was and what a good boy I am everytime I ask a stupid question feels pretty humiliating.
(Still better than SO)
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I've never had an issue asking a question on stack overflow.
I'd wager a lot of 'you people' that have issues with it probably didn't do enough research on your own.
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There’s issues on both sides. A lot of people who ask questions are clearly just asking others to do their homework or otherwise haven’t made any effort, but there are also a lot of people who are unnecessarily hostile.
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I forget where I heard the quote, but:
Stack Overflow is a great place to find answers. Stack Overflow is a terrible place to ask questions.
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Their moderation approach is a big part of why it's a great place to search for answers.
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Problem being that someone else asked the question 10 years ago and the answer is now irrelevant due to version changes. People with high scores are just early adopters who answered all of the easy questions. Hostile users generally can't understand the question. The issue with llms answering your question is that they are going to be stuck in the current time period. In the future their answers will also be irrelevant due to version changes.
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Earlier today I googled how to toggle full screen in dosbox-x and the AI-generated answer said to use alt+enter. Tried it and it didn't work, so I look in the documentation and it turns out that they changed it to F12+f a while ago (probably to avoid interfering with actual dos input).
This is definitely already a problem.
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I mean that is already a problem, if you ask a question you have to be ready for the answer to be a mismatch of version conflicts.
But that is ok. ChatGPT is a tool that can either help you or hurt you. I like to think of it like a power hammer. If you are doing a roofing job, it can help you get things done faster compared to a manual hammer, but you still need to know how to build a roof to get started.
ChatGPT is great at helping you organize your thoughts or finding an answer to some error message buried in some log file, but you still need to know what questions to ask and you need to be ready for it to give you a stupid answer and how to get around that.
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I see this hot take often, and it isn’t entirely without merit, but it is mitigated by moderation; in some Stack communities better than others. I’ve been an active member for many years, and in my view it goes like this.
If you contribute a question without reading the rules and How to Ask a Good Question, you don’t provide minimal reproducible steps with code, post images of code, etc. you may get flamed out of town. And that may feel bad and it may be mean if the questioner didn’t know to read those. But they are there for you.
If, however, you ask a thoughtful question, give examples, show what you’ve tried, etc. you definitely can get quality, courteous help.
Doesn’t change that video killed the radio star here. The show is over.
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Beginners are the least likely to ask thoughtful questions. We include slides in lectures about how to ask a question, but when there's an assignment deadline and you're inexperienced, it's more likely you're going to just blurt out "help me!" rather than provide a detailed explanation that doesn't require repeated prompting. It takes time to learn how to work through an issue yourself before asking. Students are often facing time pressure and that can drive bad behavior. Correcting them is important, just don't do it in a way that crushes their spirit.
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For me, strict rules are what make this website useful. No threads named "help me" is why I like reading it.
For newcomers there is https://stackoverflow.com/staging-ground
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Even for non newcomers, having threads marked as duplicates for problems introduced by version changes that aren't considered in the original question/answers is a major issue.
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I've asked questions on S.O. I've answered some too.
What I've found works well on s-o is
- Researching a bit first
- Asking a question properly*
- Including that search attempt to prove you've done some due-diligence
I've found even a dick like me can get a lot of leeway by showing I've put in the effort and asked properly.
*Same as Usenet
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I'm not convinced that the number of questions asked is the correct metric. In the end the point is not to have a constant flow of questions, rather constant flow of answers found.
There is a point in proficiency in language/library/whatever after which it is faster to find the answer in the code/documentation/test example than to wait until another person on even higher level will come and answer your question.
Maybe we simply filled out what was needed to be asked in the beginner-bug found-intermediate space and, apart from questions stemming from new versions etc, SO does not need more questions?Expectation for everything to constantly grow is unrealistic
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Honestly using the existing question stock to generate current-version answers using the current documentation as synthetic training data is probably the way to go.
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As more and more libraries are open source on GitHub or gitlab or sourceforge or whateverthefuck, asking questions on the libraries themselves (as an issue) is often the right thing to do, too... Less centralised than SO but also the only people who care about how to do things in a lib are people using the lib, so.....
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So here’s what I don’t get. LLMs were trained on data from places like SO. SO starts losing users ,and thus content. Content that LLMs ingest to stay relevant.
So where will LLMs get their content after a certain point? Especially for new things that may come out or unique situations. It’s not like it’ll scrape the answer from a web page if people are just asking LLMs.
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They're probably hoping to use people's submitted code for training. But that seems like it will be diminishing returns
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The snake eats its tail and it all degenerates into slop. Happy coding!
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You are assuming that people act in logical ways.
This is only a problem right now if you think about it.
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The need for the service that SO provided won't go away. Eventually people will migrate to new places to discuss. LLM creators will either constantly scrape those as well, forcing them to implement more and more countermeasures and GenAI-poison, or the services themselves will enshittify and sell our content (i.e. the commons) to LLM-creators.
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Same question applies to all the other websites out there being mined to train LLMs. Google search Overviews removes the need for people to visit linked sites. Traffic plummets. Ads dry up, and the sites go out of business. No new content to train on 🤷🏻♂️
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This is an area where synthetic data can be useful. For example, you could scrape the documentation and source code for a Python library and then use an existing LLM to generate questions and answers about the content to train future coding assistants on. As long as the training data gets well curated for quality it's perfectly useful for this kind of thing, no need for an actual forum.
AI companies have a lot of clever people working for them, they're aware of these problems.
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Even without LLMs, it’s possible StackOverflow would have eventually faded into irrelevance
Yeah, exactly. A lot of groups have a Discord :( or other forums where people ask questions. I know I've had to ask questions on Svelte's Discord :( for example. And I think even once on some YouTube influencer's Slack...
Sucks cuz both of those places are silos and my questions and answers are forever lost.
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Projects that use Discord for support piss me right off. What a stupid way to keep answering the same question over and over again.
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It's not like discord is any better than SO. It's a closed platform, often with no read access if you don't want to register, and it's not searchable in the slightest.
I would take SO any day over discord.
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Never again will I help provide content to a VC-backed service just so that they can rugpull us and cash-out.
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That's why people should be posting on fedi and never post on corporate web.
When corporate tells you its a parasite, believe it
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What exactly do you accuse Stack Overflow for? As far as I know this service has always been free to use and data is easily downloadable.
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"Free to use" on a VC-backed service just means you're the product. I am accusing them of the same thing I'm accusing each VC-backed service: That they exploit our efforts to cash out and then sell the service for someone who will enshittify it for profit.
Also, what do you mean "easily downloadable"? Can anyone download the entire corpus of SO in a way that they could set up their own SO with the same content to bootstrap them?
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I live in the hope that the insightful comments I left on reddit over my long tenure there will eventually be part of a FOSS corpus, once the VCs can't extract anything of competitive value from it anymore. I'll be long dead, but my comments will live on.
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Even without LLMs, it’s possible StackOverflow would have eventually faded into irrelevance – perhaps driven by moderation policy changes or something else that started in 2014
💯
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actually, i was surprised it took off at all, because there are plenty less formal alternatives, but the name is catchy with devs. maybe that's all it took.
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It took off because searching a specific issue is likely to give you a good and comprehensive answer back with minimal effort, so it kept being ranked well in search engines.
Other less "pedantic" forums are great for discussion and they encourage new questions, but they don't perform nearly as well for people searching for the answers or the context they're looking for: there's too much noise in the discussion and answers are often scattered in multiple topics.
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People seem to be happy because of SO becoming irrelevant. I really don't get it, I used this website for many years now and for me it is the second (after Wikipedia) most valuable source of knowledge. The UI is clean, no intrusive adds, best answer is the most visible. Threads are well organised and on topic. No spam, no dark patterns, no wasting your time. Discoverability is great, you can easily browse and learn knew things. It is also SEO friendly. Why do you prefer Discord? What do I miss?
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Most people can't think for themselves and will say whatever makes them fit in with their peers.
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People got butthurt after being told their beginner question has already been answered
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Why do you prefer Discord? What do I miss?
I’ve had a discussion with someone about this. Apparently, there are people that enjoy the social contact. Some seem to like sitting in a Discord chat all day long and answering the same questions over and over again. Others like to “just ask” someone instead of looking for a solution themselves.
That there’s no clear structure of all the solutions provided via Discord and thus people have to ask the same things, nor a proper way of backing everything up in case Discord goes rogue seems to be blissfully ignored.
It’s probably part of the same phenomenon that, nowadays, people seem unable to write or read a few lines of documentation and instead create/watch 20 minutes on YouTube.
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YouTube might be the plague that killed the written web, you say? The blogging murderer?
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best answer is the most visible
no wasting your time
These two points aren't always true in my experience. On more than a few occasions, I have encountered posts that look similar to the problems that I am facing, but because of a slight nuance (on the surface), the answers suggested won't help.
Usually, my search would hit a deadend here. At this point, I guess the best course of action is to create a new post. Unfortunately, these new posts would then get closed as a duplicate of the similar post - even though the problem in that particular context still hasn't been solved
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get closed as a duplicate of the similar post
I've definitely had this happen to be before. It's annoying.
What I do in that case is proactively say:
I'm facing problem X. I've tried searching for solutions. I found post X2 and X3 that are similar, but my problem is actually different because of Y.
Sometimes it helps.
Also, if you see people being assholes you can report them. There's a flag for "unfriendly or unkind". I've definitely used that before.
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Agree with you, SO is great for finding info. There are solutions on there for niche problems that I haven't been able to find elsewhere, the type of thing where someone actually took the time to type out a step-by-step answer and it's now there and searchable on SO. It's a bummer that so many people seem to hate on the site nowadays.
And lets not forget the whole reason SO came out in the first place, back then web results were littered with question/answer links to sites like Experts-Exchange. I hated trying to figure out if an answer was on there, most of the time you ended up with a link to a question that you think has an answer but oh no you need to subscribe to view an answer that may or may not exist.
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I used it once in high school, got called a retard for asking a beginner question, then avoided it like the plague for 20 years.
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I highly doubt they called you a retard.
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Hey look everyone it's that retard from stack overflow!
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Aw shit, not again.
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Not necessarily directly, many people may have abandoned learning programming because of LLMs, rather than Stack Overflow specifically.
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You’re pulling this out of your ass. That is completely made up.
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I don't think such trend would be so big. And anyone who has used any LLM for programming learns very quickly that those are very far from replacing anyone
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People who know programming already, yes. People who are getting into it / want to get into it, see it as an amazing shortcut.
I had two working students already, who thought and communicated that they don't really need to learn programming, because they can do it with ChatGPT / Q. It was quite infuriating.
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For real. You can tell how good a programmer someone is, by how good they think an LLM is at programming.
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Not terribly surprising, Google would often direct me to StackOverflow threads as I was googling for an answer to a question. And as often as not, either the question was closed; or, instead of anyone providing an answer, the commenters would spiral off into questioning everything about the original question asker's life choices. While I do get the whole XY Problem, this sort of thing seemed to be over-used on SO.
Granted, I don't know if AI answers are any better. Sure, they can answer a lot of the simple questions, but I've not seen them be useful on hard, more obscure questions. Probably because those questions don't have ready answers on SO.
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the whole XY Problem
lol. I hate this. Just answer the damn question or don't. I'm not asking you to validate if what I'm doing is weird or not. It's weird! I know! That's none of your business. Just answer the damn question or don't. Simple as.
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I've lost count the number of times where I try to find something in SO, and it's just someone posting the exact same example code as the answer. Or someone suggesting you just google it. Then I ask ChatGPT... and I get an answer.
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I stopped using it before chatgpt arrived. You can always find answers in the documentation or in github issues
133 comments