Technology

Four months ago, we asked Are LLMs making Stack Overflow irrelevant?

"That's a stupid question, marked as solved."

It's not dead until I stop getting 10 year old outdated answers in my searches!

Ai haters out there, doesn't this give a valid use case for LLM?

SO is a collaborative encyclopedia of technical discussion that tries to be relevant, be practical, and to not constantly repeat topics.

LLMs can't provide that structure, they just shit out answers.

Most people think SO is a help desk and don't appreciate the structure and just want it to shit out an answer.

Maybe SO isn't dying so much as a cancerous growth is being treated.

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.

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

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.

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

Never again will I help provide content to a VC-backed service just so that they can rugpull us and cash-out.

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.

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

💯

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

I wonder how well LLMs would do without SO's data

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.