On one hand, it's an incredible place full of smart people and has some of the best rabbit holes to fall into. On the other hand, portions of the site (programming among them) has the worst culture imaginable and has likely turned as many people off from learning as it has helped.
I anticipate SO will go into decline and get worse as a result. I wonder how much GPT will suffer without it as a source.
In a way, they’re kind of a match made in heaven: domain experts who share experience and knowledge not found in the user docs alone, cleaned of the antisocial nastiness usually filtered by tech writers and PR peeps.
Stackoverflow may be up or down.
Please return later when you are able to determine exactly where your problem is and have read all the documentation on Unix, C and the internet.
With the additional problem that someone invented a way to take your question pages and tailor them to the exact needs of a particular user.
There always seems to be a strong consensus whenever SO is mentioned on HN, and it’s always very negative. Why don’t they change the moderation rules, if the supposed target audience is constantly frustrated with them?
Could be conflicts of interest involved too. For a while it seemed someone was getting paid at least a little to close every Israel question on politics.se.
Recently on reddit /r/art the mods collectively quit because people were making fun of them for gatekeeping someone. Everyone made fun of them more. Stack overflow are reddit mods gone extreme, they believe their job is to stop all activity on their boards apparently.
Will synthetic data and documentation RAG really be enough? Or will we be stuck at 2022 debugging knowledge forever?
Not Stackoverflow, because all my questions are either ignored or closed, even when extremely detailed and unique.
Now, AWS has a documentation MCP server that can integrate with ChatGPT.
https://github.com/awslabs/mcp/tree/main/src/aws-api-mcp-ser...
I haven’t used it.
Yet. By the time stackoverlow shuts down, AIs will be powerful enough to take data from docs or just from the source code alone. I mean the new version of opus is pretty good at understanding my front end source code. I think that should be the goal of AIs (that they are so advanced they don’t need to read code examples from a third party website like stackoverflow)
Therefore, as both a data source and a QA website, Stack Overflow has lost its relevance.
If an LLM can read the source of the library you’re trying to use - or examples of others using the library in GitHub, or official documentation - then there is less of a need for a fellow SOer to put the pieces together to debug issues and answer questions.
And if usage declines, what will be feed future LLMs with?
