I like the experience using Copilot and GPT much better than browsing SO, but this is what worries me in the long-term though:
This issue goes beyond the survival of Stack Overflow. All AI models need a steady flow of quality human data to train on. Without that, they’ll be left to rely on machine-generated content, and researchers have found that this leads to worse performance. There’s an ominous name for this: model collapse.
Without this incredible knowledge sharing and curated feedback, in an environment that constantly changes with new libraries, languages, and best practices, these LLMs are doomed. I think solving this might be Stack Overflow’s way out.
From what we see today based on these LLMs that are given a larger context (e.g. internal documentation or knowledge bases), we can say that it’d be as good as a decent developer that reads said documentation and it’s able to apply that knowledge to a specific use case.
But Stack Overflow answers often target things that don’t come up in the docs, that are outdated, or somewhat case-dependent and/or opinionated. Answers that might even lead to changes in documentation. This kind of insight will be hampered over time without a way of continuously sharing such knowledge.
The only thing making SO decline is that they have a CEO. And that CEO is trying to “compete”.
Just keep being a great platform for Q&A and stop chasing profits. People prefer SO because the ansewrds are trustworthy. LLMs will always bullshit you and never be better than a platform free of AI crap.
I agree. That being said, there is some majorly bad answers on stack overflow. 9 times out of 10 I get wrong answers, and one time I was looking for a solution in Arduino and someone answered in Javascript for some reason.
The decline has accelerated since the release of ChatGPT, which suggests there may be a connection, especially given ChatGPT’s ability to answer many coding questions.
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