It’s not that developers are switching to AI tools it’s that stack overflow is awful and has been for a long time. The AI tools are simply providing a better alternative, which really demonstrates how awful stack overflow is because the AI tools are not that good.
Ironic, they’re being closed as duplicate.
Undoubtedly. But you agree that the crowdsourced knowledge base of existing answers is useful, no? That is what the islop searches and reproduces. It is more convenient than waiting for a rude answer. But I don’t think islop will give you a good answer if someone has not been bothered answer it before in SO.
islop is a convenience, but you should fear the day you lose the original and the only way to get that info is some opaque islop oracle
Most answers on SO are either from a doc page, are common patterns found in multiple books, or is mostly opinion-based. Most code AIs are significantly better at the first two without even being trained on SO (which I wouldn’t want anyway - SO really does suck nowadays)
Would you say the same about Wikipedia?
TBH asking questions on SO (and most similar platforms) fucking sucks, no surprise that users jump at the first opportunity at getting answers another way.
Removed. Someone else already said this before. Also, please ensure you stick to the stlye guides next time, and be less ambiguous. SO could mean a plethora of things.
Spoiler
Last time this question was answered was for several years older software versions, and the old solutions don’t work anymore. Whoops!
SO PTSD is real.
I was in the middle of making a reply like this but yours is better. Closed as duplicate.
I will never forget the time I posted a question about why something wasn’t working as I expected, with a minimal example (≈ 10 lines of python, no external libraries) and a description of the expected behaviour and observed behaviour.
The first three-ish replies I got were instant comments that this in fact does work like I would expect, and that the observed behaviour I described wasn’t what the code would produce. A day later, some highly-rated user made a friendly note that I had a typo that just happened to trigger this very unexpected error.
Basically, I was thrashed by the first replies, when the people replying hadn’t even run the code. It felt extremely good to be able to reply to them that they were asshats for saying that the code didn’t do what I said it did when they hadn’t even run it.
I post there every 6-12 months in the hope of receiving some help or intelligent feedback, but usually just have my question locked or removed. The platform is an utter joke and has been for years. AI was not entirely the reason for its downfall imo.
Not common I’m sure, but I once had an answer I posted completely rewritten for grammar, punctuation, and capitalization. I felt so valued. /s
What? People would rather have their balls licked by AI rather than have some neckbeard moderator change the entire language of their question and not answer shit? Fuck SO. That shit was so ass to interact with.
According to a Stack Overflow survey from 2025, 84 percent of developers now use or plan to use AI tools, up from 76 percent a year earlier. This rapid adoption partly explains the decline in forum activity.
As someone who participated in the survey, I’d recommend everyone take anything regarding SO’s recent surveys with a truckfull of salt. The recent surveys have been unbelievably biased with tons of leading questions that force you to answer in specific ways. They’re basically completely worthless in terms of statistics.
Realistically though, asking an LLM what’s wrong with my code is a lot faster than scrolling through 50 posts and reading the ones that talk about something almost relevant.
It’s even faster to ask your own armpit what’s wrong with your code, but that alone doesn’t mean you’re getting a good answer from it
If you get a good answer just 20% of the time, an LLM is a smart first choice. Your armpit can’t do that. And my experience is that it’s much better than 20%. Though it really depends a lot of the code base you’re working on.
How do you know it’s a good answer? That requires prior knowledge that you might have. My juniors repeatedly demonstrate they’ve no ability to tell whether an LLM solution is a good one or not. It’s like copying from SO without reading the comments, which they quickly learn not to do because it doesn’t pass code review.
Also depends on your level of expertise. If you have beginner questions, an LLM should give you the correct answer most of the time. If you’re an expert, your questions have no answers. Usually, it’s something like an obscure firmware bug edge case even the manufacturer isn’t aware of. Good luck troubleshooting that without writing your own drivers and libraries.
If you’re writing cutting edge shit, then LLM is probably at best a rubber duck for talking things through. Then there are tons of programmers where the job is to translate business requirements into bog standard code over and over and over.
Nothing about my job is novel except the contortions demanded by the customer — and whatever the current trendy JS framework is to try to beat it into a real language. But I am reasonably good at what I do, having done it for thirty years.
Boring standard coding is exactly where you can actually let the LLM write the code. Manual intervention and review is still required, but at least you can speed up the process.
Code made up of severally parts with inconsistently styles of coding and design is going to FUCK YOU UP in the middle and long terms unless you never again have to touch that code.
It’s only faster if you’re doing small enough projects that an LLM can generate the whole thing in one go (so, almost certainly, not working as professional at a level beyond junior) and it’s something you will never have to maintain (i.e. prototyping).
Using an LLM is like giving the work to a large group of junior developers were each time you give them work it’s a random one that picks up the task and you can’t actually teach them: even when it works, what you get is riddled with bad practices and design errors that are not even consistently the same between tasks so when you piece the software together it’s from the very start the kind of spaghetti mess you see in a project with lots of years in production which has been maintained by lots of different people who didn’t even try to follow each others coding style plus since you can’t teach them stuff like coding standards or design for extendability, it will always be just as fucked up as day one.
This is not because AI is good at answering programming questions accurately, it’s because SO sucks. The graph shows its growth leveling off around 2014 and then starting the decline around 2016, which isn’t even temporally correlated with LLMs.
Sites like SO where experienced humans can give insightful answers to obscure programming questions are clearly still needed. Every time I ask AI a programming question about something obscure, it usually knows less than I do, and if I can’t find a post where another human had the same problem, I’m usually left to figure it out for myself.
Serious question here. LLMs trained their data off SO. Developers now ask LLMs for solutions instead of SO. New technology comes out that LLMs don’t have indexed. Where will LLMs get their data to train on for new technologies? You can’t exactly feed it a manual and expect it to extrapolate or understand (for that matter “what manual).
Yes, that is the major problem with LLMs in general. There is no solution aside from “train on another different source (like Reddit)”, but then we rinse & repeat.
I am worried, because there are increasing cases where open source docs are going offline because they can’t take the bandwidth costs of the big LLM bots recrawling hundreds of times per day. Wikipedia is also getting hammered. There is so much waste and diminishing returns
go ai, go broke
It’s all already been used to train AI at this point.
LLM’s won’t be helping but SE/SO have been fully enshitifying themselves for years.
It was amazing in the early days.
Who is going to ask there to be harresed
Even before AI I stopped asking any questions or even answering for that matter on that website within like the first few months of using it. Just not worth the hassle of dealing with the mods and the neck beard ass users and I didn’t want my account to get suspended over some BS in case I really needed to ask an actual question in the future, now I can’t remember the last time I’ve been to any stack website and it does not show up in the Google search results anymore, they dug their own grave
The humans of StackOverflow have been pricks for so long. If they fixed that problem years ago they would have been in a great position with the advent of AI. They could’ve marketed themselves as a site for humans. But no, fuckfacepoweruser found an answer to a different question he believes answers your question so marked your question as a duplicate and fuckfacerubberstamper voted to close it in the queue without critically thinking about it.
If the alternative is the cesspit that is Yahoo Answers and Quora, I’ll take the heavy-handed moderation of StackOverflow.
You don’t think there’s any middle ground between the two? None whatsoever?
Of course there’s a middle ground, that’s much closer in my ideal world to StackOverflow than it is to Yahoo Answers or Quora.
Nobody here is suggesting for you to use Yahoo Answers.
I’m just using it as an example of what a Q&A site with inadequate moderation looks like. If you can’t see that then I don’t think we’re going to see eye to eye no matter how long this discussion continues.
Okay? But why? StackOverflow’s moderation is inadequate as well.
Well, no. If there were a middle ground, we’d all be using it.
Like Lemmy? The site we’re all using?
But no my point wasn’t about a specific site, it’s about the moderation approach. Do you really think there’s no middle ground in approach to moderation between Yahoo Answers and StackOverflow?
Like Lemmy? The site we’re all using?
Cute. Except Lemmy hasn’t helped me solve any programming problems. StackOverflow has.
And I think you missed my point, so I’ll restate it: If this theoretical middle-ground moderation were actually viable, it would have eaten StackOverflow’s lunch like a decade ago. People were SALTY about SO’s hostility even before the “summer of love” campaign in 2012.
It’s viable, StackExchange as a company is just shit. See: then never listening to meta, listening to random Twitter users more, and defaming their volunteer moderators.
Worrying that forums will dissappear too.
The only answer you’ll get are SKUM sponsored bullshit with embedded ads.
Remember before they destroyed the internet? Good times.
I’m happy to see a bit of a renaissance of forums in the last few years. Quite a few open source projects now run forums built on the Discourse engine (open-source, can be self-hosted for free). I was kinda sceptical at first, they look so different from the BBCode forums I was used to, but over time came to appreciate the features that drag the forum format into the 21st century.
I hope an increasing number of projects come to realise the drawbacks of Discord, namely that you keep years’ worth of information on someone else’s centralised platform, and it’s very difficult to find past information even for members of the server, and impossible from the outside. I look at a handful of Discord channels daily, but had to mute some because users keep asking the same questions every two days…
Stack Overflow lost its job to ai
To AI using Stack Overflow data.
Good. That site has been a toxic hole in the ground for a decade or more.
That site is an incredible resource
How much longer will 15 year old answers be useful?
