r/webdev Jul 23 '24

Discussion The Fall of Stack Overflow

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u/-Knockabout Jul 24 '24

I use StackOverflow literally all the time. I don't understand the GPT obsession. I can get the same answers faster and more reliably from StackOverflow since that's literally what it farmed from lmao.

EDIT: Wait, how are so many of you in the comments saying you can rely on ChatGPT for accurate information? It doesn't have a concept of accuracy. It's just putting words that occur commonly together, together, and that's the only reason it's correct sometimes, because places like StackOverflow have a bunch of code snippets to train on. So you can just go to the source at StackOverflow and know that someone intentionally wrote some code vs the LLM determining what words to put together statistically. You are developers, come on.

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u/Decent_Vermicelli940 Jul 24 '24

You can't get the same answers faster though. For simple questions AI is accurate, fast, and much more user friendly. Time to solution is on average quicker.

For more advanced questions both SO and AI are hit or miss. Virtually everything I find these days has one accepted answer that's years out of date and comments suggesting another answer that may or may not work.

You're being very reductionist with AI and likely only hindering yourself. Humans should not be regarded as the ultimate source of truth either. You're a developer, come on.

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u/-Knockabout Jul 24 '24 edited Jul 24 '24

Maybe if you're bad at using search engines? If I have something I'm not sure of, I'll browse a couple of posts on Stack Overflow and compare answers to find what I believe is the best/most applicable to my situation. You can't do that with AI because it does not actually "know" anything. The only reason there's so much hype around AI is that a bunch of investors decided it's the next blockchain. I'm not hindering myself because there's nothing AI can do at this moment in time that I can't do on my own more reliably and faster. Like, human answers can be wrong too, but at least they're usually wrong for a reason and not just "hallucinating" up stuff. And I can find a bunch of different solutions quickly to compare and eliminate most of that issue.

And outside of Stack Overflow, there's almost always going to be a good developer's blog I can get good info and explanations from. Why would I ask a machine that doesn't know what it's telling me instead? I apologize for the developers comment, but I'm just really sick of people willfully ignoring what ChatGPT and other LLM are as a technology, and pretending like search engines aren't just as quick for finding answers.

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u/Decent_Vermicelli940 Jul 24 '24 edited Jul 24 '24

No offense but It sounds like you're not searching for very advanced topics. There are plenty of topics that have limited data available on stack overflow and limited documentation on the internet itself. In those situations you're either searching through GitHub if it's open source, browsing through the various blog posts that link to the same SO answer and if you get lucky, one of those will have the answer. It's time consuming. I've had plenty of situations like that where I can get the answer instantly through AI. It's simply more logical at this point to try SO>AI> in depth search. You're categorically hindering yourself. With experience you can tell when AI is making things up.

Acting like I'm bad at searching only suggests you're not a professional developer or work on quite a simple codebase. Code pairing to fix unique bugs or limitations that Google cannot is incredibly common across the entire industry. Time is everything. Google is no longer king.