Comment by 827a
4 days ago
Its a nice productivity and capability boost that feels on the same magnitude as, for example, React. The "dream" of it being able to just take tickets and agentically get a PR up for review is possible for ~5% of tickets. That goes up to ~10% if your organization has no standards at all, including even a self-serving standard like "at least make sure the repository remains useful to future AI usage".
My organization would still hire as many software engineers as we could afford.
- Stack Overflow has to be actually dead at this point. There's no reason to go there, or even Google, anymore.
- Using it for exploratory high level research and summarization into unfamiliar repos is pretty nice.
- Very rarely does AI write code that I feel would last a year without needing to be rewritten. That makes it good for things like knocking out a quick script or updating a button color.
- None of them actually follow instructions e.g. in Cursor rules. Its a serious problem. It doesn't matter how many times or where I tell it "one component per file, one component per file", all caps, threaten its children, offer it a cookie, it just does whatever it wants.
> Stack Overflow has to be actually dead at this point. There's no reason to go there, or even Google, anymore.
I wonder if we are going to pay for that, as a society. The number of times I went there, asking some tricky question about a framework, and have the actual author or one of the core contributors answer me was astonishing.
As I wrote in a root comment, it’s decimating the traffic of informational websites. We will lose a lot of those websites that produced high-effort, simple-conclusion information. Who will bother with in-depth reviews if someone else gets the sale? Who will patiently answer questions if no one asks anymore?
I think that a certain kind of craftsmanship will be lost.
AI companies are eating their seed corn.
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I've been using SO since it first launched, and through time it has changed a lot already. It used to be simple to ask questions and get answers, when it grew and the huge influx of questions required moderation it was a nice smooth change but over time the pearl clutching of mods to mark many reasonable questions as irrelevant started to grip the usefulness.
I used to answer a lot of the basic questions just to help others as I've felt I had been helped, the moderation shift applying more and more rules started to make me feel unwelcomed to ask questions and even to answer. I do understand why it happened, with the influx of people trying to game the platform to show off in their resumés they were at the "top" of whatever buzzword was hot in the industry at the time but it still affected me as a contributing user out of kindness.
By 2018 I would not even login to vote or add comments, and I feel it was already going on a slow downhill path, and LLMs will definitely kill it.
We will definitely suffer, SO has been an incredible resource to figure out things not covered well in documentation, I remember when proper experts (i.e. maintainers of libraries/frameworks) would jump in to answer about a weird edge case, or clarify the usage of a feature, explain why it was misuse, etc.
Right now I don't see anything else that will provide this knowledge to LLMs, in 10-20 years time there will be a lot missing in training datasets, and it will be a slow degradation of knowledge available in the open for us all to learn from.
Yeah, SO had many problems, I'd argue most stemming from the points system that:
- Made people treat it like a contest and tried to game it
- Obscure, difficult questions, with obscure, difficult answers barely being valued, while 'How do I make a GET request in node' going gangbusters.
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AI has to draw it's answers from somewhere.
if they're not in stack overflow they have to be in reddit, or a discord channel, or something.
or else the AI has to be able to discern answers from first principles themselves, which most LLMs can't -- they're language model.
We are losing the next generation of content to train future AIs on.
> Stack Overflow has to be actually dead at this point. There's no reason to go there, or even Google, anymore.
If, like the meme, you just copied from SO without using your brain then yes AI is comparable.
If you appreciate SO for the discussion (peer review) about the answers and contrasting approaches sometimes out of left field, well good luck because AI can't and won't give you that.
There is some very deep knowledge in SO's comments and some lower rated replies. But I suspect that is not what was making Stackoverflow so popular.
I suspect the new Stack Overflow is Discord channels, at least for some platforms/frameworks. Too bad the free-form non-threaded discussion format of Discord makes things so hard to follow.
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The give and take of contrasting views is certainly lost by LLMs, which create the illusion of a consensus answer to any question.
Every time I probe LLMs on questions on fields in which I have expertise, it goes the same way.
They give me some sort of American news media "both sides" type of summary. The answer is always a variation of "it's not one thing, it's many" and the many things are all the opinions that exist on the topic as if they were all equivalent.
Yes, very much this. I liked having 5 different approaches, and discussions of which one works best, rather than having an AI select one to use.
Since when does SO have good discussions?
They used to, but in the past few years all I've ever gotten on the site is downvotes and close flags. No one is interested in actually answering questions, let alone discussing them: the site has trained everyone to become pedantic bureaucrats instead.