Summarizer

There was some of that for sure; sites that were all but designed to be attractive nuisances and took near-heroic efforts to moderate at all, with little chance of not causing a lot of drama. OTOH, topic-specific sites like Mathematics, MathOverflow, Physics, even small ones like Home Improvement or Seasoned Advice... Managed to collect a lot of good stuff: common niche questions with good answers that have a good chance at staying relevant for a long time to come. In a sane world, a few relevant ads on these sites would be enough to fund them for decades. But that appears to be another area where Google kinda shit the bed.

LLMs also search Google for answers. Hence the knowledge may be not lost even for those who only supervises machines that write code.

Thinking from first principles, a large part of the content on stack overflow comes from the practical experience and battle scars worn by developers sharing them with others and cross-curating approaches. Privacy concerns notwithstanding, one could argue having LLMs with us every step of the way - coding agents, debugging, devops tools etc. It will be this shared interlocutor with vast swaths of experiential knowledge collected and redistributed at an even larger scale than SO and forum-style platforms allow for. It does remove the human touch so it's quite a different dynamic and the amount of data to collect is staggering and challenging from a legal point of view, but I suspect a lot of the knowledge used to train LLMs in the next ten years will come from large-scale telemetry and millions of hours in RL self-play where LLMs learn to scale and debug code from fizzbuzz to facebook and twitter-like distributed system.

>>what happens now? I'll tell you what happens now: LLMs continue to regurgitate and iterate and hallucinate on the questions and answers they ingested from S.O. - 90% of which are incorrect. LLM output continues to poison itself as more and more websites spring up recycling outdated or incorrect answers, and no new answers are given since no one wants to waste the time to ask a human a question and wait for the response . The overall intellectual capacity sinks to the point where everything collaboratively built falls apart. The machines don't need AGI to take over, they just need to wait for us to disintegrate out of sheer laziness, sloth and self-righteous.... /okay. there was always a needy component to Stack Overflow. "I have to pass an exam, what is the best way to write this algorithm?" and shit like that. A lazy component. But to be honest, it was the giving of information which forced you to think, and research, and answer correctly , which made systems like S.O. worthwhile, even if the questioners were lazy idiots sometimes. And now, the apocalypse. Babel. The total confusion of all language. No answer which can be trusted, no human in the loop, not even a smart AI, just a babbling set of LLMs repeating Stack Overflow answers from 10 years ago. That's the fucking future. Things are gonna slide / in all directions / won't be nothin you can measure anymore. The blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold and it's overturned the order of the soul.[0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WlbQRoz3o4

Can you explain what you're saying in greater depth? Are you saying that the reason there is no human expertise on the internet anymore is that everyone with knowledge is now under contract to train AIs?

No, I think the reason human expertise on the internet is dying out is because we have a cacophany of voices trying to be heard on the internet, and experts aren't interested in screaming into the void unless they directly need to do it to pay their bills.

I would say that going onto Stack Overflow to answer questions made me a better coder - yeah, even with the cacophony of bullshit and repeats. It's almost more offensive for that job to be taken by "AI" than the job of writing the stupid code I was trying to help people fix. [edit] because I kind of get what you're saying... I truly don't care what marginal benefits people are trying to get out of popularity in the high school locker room that is the Social Media internet. I still have a weird habit of giving everyone a full answer to their questions, and trying to teach people what I know when I can. Not for kudos or points, but because the best way to learn is by teaching .

Or we just stagnate, as tech no longer can afford to change.

Instead of having chat-interfaces target single developers, moving towards multiplayer interfaces may bring back some of what has been lost--looping in experts or third-party knowledge when a problem is too though to tackle via agentic means. Now all our interactions are neatly kept in personalised ledgers, bounded and isolated from one another. Whether by design or by technical infeasability, the issue remains that knowledge becomes increasingly bounded too instead of collaborative.

Jeff was the author of https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-... and was more focused on quality than community - his vision was the library. Joel was indeed more community minded - though part of that community mindedness was also more expectations of community moderation than what the tooling was able to scale for. And yes, they both were to blame for gamification - though part of that was the Web 2.0 ideals of the time and the hook to keep a person coming back to it. It was part of the question that was to be answered "how do you separate the core group from the general participants on a site?" ... and that brings me to "people need to read A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy" ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23723205 ) to understand how it shaped Stack Overflow. https://blog.codinghorror.com/its-clay-shirkys-internet-we-j... (2008) https://web.archive.org/web/20110827205048/https://stackover... (Podcast #23 from 2011) Atwood: Maybe. But the cool thing about this is this is not just me, because that would be boring. It is actually me and Clay Shirky. You know, Clay Shirky is one of my heroes. Spolsky: Oh... Atwood: Yeah I know, it's awesome. So we get to talk about like building communities online and I get to talk about StackOverflow, you know, and all the lessons we've learned and, get to present with Clay. Obviously he's an expert so. That's one of the people that I have emailed actually, because I thought that would be good, because he is from New-York city as well. So we could A) show him the site and B) talk about the thing we are going to do together in March, because he needs to see the site to have some context. I mean I did meet him and talk to him about this earlier a few months ago, I think I mentioned it on the podcasts. But that was before we had sort of even going to beta, so there's really not a lot to show him. But I would love to show him in person. So we'll see if I'll hear back from him, I do not know. https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/105232/clay-shirkys... (2011) 2014 sounds about right for when it peaked... it was also when a lot of things hit the fan one after another. General stress, the decline of community moderation. The dup hammer was a way to try to reduce the amount of close votes needed - but in doing so it became "everything is a nail" when the dup hammer. It was used to close poor questions as dups of other questions ... and rather than making it easier to close questions that didn't fit well, corporate allowed the "everything is a dup" problem to fester. That also then made Stack Overflow's search become worse. Consider https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/262080 which provides itself as a timestamp of 2014... How much traffic do the questions that get duped to something bring? Especially the (currently) 410 questions linked to the Java NPE question. That question now has 10,356 questions linked to it... and that's part of the "why search quality is going down" - because poor questions were getting linked and not deleted. Search went downhill, dupe hammer was over used because regular close votes took too long because community moderation was going down, which in turn caused people to be grumpy about "closed as dup" rather than "your question looks like it is about X, but lacks an MCVE to be able to verify that... so close it as a dup of X rather than needing 5 votes to get an MCVE close.. which would have been more helpful in guiding a user - but would mean people would start doing FGITW to answer it maybe and you'd get it as a dup of something else instead." All sorts of problems around that time.

I spent the last 14 days chasing an issue with a Spark transform. Gemini and Claude were exceptionally good at giving me answers that looked perfectly reasonable: none of them worked, they were almost always completely off-road. Eventually I tried with something else, and found a question on stackoverflow, luckily with an answer. That was the game changer and eventually I was able to find the right doc in the Spark (actually Iceberg) website that gave me the final fix. This is to say that LLMs might be more friendly. But losing SO means that we're getting an idiot friendly guy with a lot of credible but wrong answers in place of a grumpy and possibly toxic guy which, however, actually answered our questions. Not sure why someone is thinking this is a good thing.

The fundamental difference between asking on SO and asking an LLM is that SO is a public forum, and an LLM will be communicated with in private. This has a lot of implications, most of which surround the ability for people to review and correct bad information.

The other major benefit of SO being a public forum is that once a question was wrestled with and eventually answered, other engineers could stumble upon and benefit from it. With SO being replaced by LLMs, engineers are asking LLMs the same questions over and over, likely getting a wide range of different answers (some correct and others not) while also being an incredible waste of resources.

The purpose of StackOverflow was never to get askers quick answers to their specific questions. Its purpose is to create a living knowledge repository of problems and solutions which future folk may benefit from. Asking a question on StackOverflow is more like adding an article to Wikipedia than pinging a colleague for help. If someone doesn't care about contributing to such a repository then they should ask their question elsewhere (this was true even before the rise of LLMs). StackOverflow itself attempts to explain this in various ways, but obviously not sufficiently as this is an incredibly common misconception.

What I'm appreciating here is the quality of the _best_ human responses on SO. There are always a number of ways to solve a problem. A good SO response gives both a path forward, and an explanation why, in the context of other possible options, this is the way to do things. LLMs do not automatically think of performance, maintainability, edge cases etc when providing a response, in no small part because they do not think. An LLM will write you a regex HTML parser.[0] The stats look bleak for SO. Perhaps there's a better "experience" with LLMs, but my point is that this is to our detriment as a community. [^0]: He comes, https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open...

SO was somewhere people put their hard won experience into words, that an LLM could train on. That won't be happening anymore, neither on SO or elsewhere. So all this hard won experience, from actually doing real work, will be inaccessible to the LLMs. For modern technologies and problems I suspect it will be a notably worse experience when using an LLM than working with older technologies. It's already true for example, when using the Godot game engine instead of Unity. LLMs constantly confuse what you're trying to do with Unity problems, offer Unity based code solutions etc.

There are so many "great" answers on StackOverflow. Giving the why and not just the answer.

>> Eventually I tried with something else, and found a question on stackoverflow, luckily with an answer. That was the game changer and eventually I was able to find the right doc Read carefully and paraphrase to the generous side. The metaphor that follows that is obviously trying to give an example of what might be somehow lost.

Interpreting that claim as "SO users always, 100% of the time answer questions correctly" is uncharitable to the point of being unreasonable. Most people would interpret the claim as concisely expressing that you get better accuracy from grumpy SO users than friendly LLMs.

> Would you still defend your position if the “grumpy” guy answered in Linus’ style? If they answered correctly, yes. My point is that providing _actual knowledge_ is by itself so much more valuable compared to _simulated knowledge_, in particular when that simulated knowledge is hyper realistic and wrong.

People in this thread are missing another key component in the decline of StackOverflow - the more experienced you become, the less useful it is. The harder the problem, the less engagement it gets. People who spend hours working on your issue are rewarded with a single upvote. Meanwhile, "how do I concat a string" gets dozens or hundreds of upvotes. The incentive/reward structure punished experienced folks with challenging/novel questions. Pair that with the toxic moderation and trigger-happy close-votes, you get a zombie community with little new useful content.

> People in this thread are missing another key component in the decline of StackOverflow - the more experienced you become, the less useful it is. This is literally not true. The rate you learn and encounter new things depends on many things: you, your mood, your energy etc. But not on the amount of your experience. > The harder the problem, the less engagement it gets. People who spend hours working on your issue are rewarded with a single upvote. This is true, but not relevant, I don't think many people care. Some might, but not many.

I don't know what your experience has been, but I do feel that at some point you will find yourself on or beyond SO's "knowledge frontier". The questions you land on will be unanswered or have equally confused replies; or you might be the one who's asking a question instead. I've "paid back" by leaving a high quality response on unanswered SO questions that I've had to figure out myself, but it felt quite thankless since even the original poster would disappear, and anyone who found my answer from Google wouldn't be able to give me an upvote either.

No, you don't. Not only there are many examples of detailed stackoverflow articles written by absolute experts, you also need answer often for something trivial(which is like half of my chatgpt), e.g. how to export in pgadmin, or a nondescriptive error in linux.

I think it is true, but not because you have nothing more to learn when you're experienced, but that there are fewer and fewer people on SO to answer the questions that you encounter when you get more and more experienced. I've answered about 200 questions. I've asked two, and both remain unanswered to this day. One of them had comments from someone who clearly was out of their league but wanted to be helpful. The people who could've answered those questions are not (or were not at that time) on SO.

This has been my experience. My initial (most popular) questions (and I asked almost twice as many questions, as I gave answers) were pretty basic, but they started getting a lot more difficult, as time went on, and they became unanswered, almost always (I often ended up answering my own question, after I figured it out on my own). I was pretty pissed at this, because the things I encountered, were the types of things that people who ship, encounter; not academic exercises. Tells me that, for all the bluster, a lot of folks on there, don't ship. LLMs may sometimes give pretty sloppy answers, but they are almost always ship-relevant.

Maybe there's a key idea for something to replace StackOverflow as a human tech Q&A forum: Having a system which somehow incentivizes asking and answering these sorts of challenging and novel questions. These are the questions which will not easily be answered using LLMs, as they require more thought and research.

To be fair, asking why someone wants to do something is often a good question. Especially in places like StackOverflow where the people asking questions are often inexperienced. I see it all the time professionally too. People ask "how do I do X" and I tell them. Then later on I find out that the reason they're asking is because they went down a whole rabbit hole they didn't need to go down. An analogy I like is imagine you're organising a hike up a mountain. There's a gondola that takes you to the top on the other side, but you arrange hikes for people that like hiking. You get a group of tourists and they're all ready to hike. Then before you set off you ask the question "so, what brings you hiking today" and someone from the group says "I want to get to the top of the mountain and see the sights, I hate hiking but it is what it is". And then you say "if you take a 15 minute drive through the mountain there's a gondola on the other side". And the person thanks you and goes on their way because they didn't know there was a gondola. They just assumed hiking was the only way up. You would have been happy hiking them up the mountain but by asking the question you realised that they didn't know there was an easier way up. It just goes back to first principles. The truth is sometimes people decide what the solution looks like and then ask for help implementing that solution. But the solution they chose was often the wrong solution to begin with.

The well known XY problem[1]. I spent years on IRC, first getting help and later helping others. I found out myself it was very useful to ask such questions when someone I didn't know asked a somewhat unusual question. The key is that if you're going to probe for Y, you usually need to be fairly experienced yourself so you can detect the edge cases, where the other person has a good reason. One approach I usually ended up going for when it appeared the other person wasn't a complete newbie was to first explain that I think they're trying to solve the wrong problem or otherwise going against the flow, and that there's probably some other approach that's much better. Then I'd follow up with something like "but if you really want to proceed down this rrack, this is how I'd go about it", along with my suggestion. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem

>I see it all the time professionally too. People ask "how do I do X" and I tell them. Then later on I find out that the reason they're asking is because they went down a whole rabbit hole they didn't need to go down. Yep. The magic question is "what are you trying to accomplish?". Oftentimes people lacking experience think they know the best way to get the results they're after and aren't aware of the more efficient ways someone with more experience might go about solving their problem.

To avoid going insane the mindset should be to produce something useful for future readers.

He and Jeff made it abundantly clear their mission was to destroy the sex change site because that site was immoral for monetizing the benevolence of the community who answered the questions. "Knowledge should be free" they said. "You shouldn't make money off stuff like this," they said. Plenty of links and backstory in my other comments.

SO had answers that you couldn't find in the documentation and were you can't look in the source code. If everything would be well documentated SO wouldn't have being as big as it was in the first place.

Many people are pointing out the toxicity, but the biggest thing that drove me away, especially for specific quantitative questions, was that SO was flat out wrong (and confidently so) on many issues. It was bad enough that I got back in the habit of buying and building a library of serious reference books because they were the only reliable way to answer detailed technical questions.

At my place of work we use an indexing service for discord that creates an index of searchable static pages for all discord interactions. So while I agree the help desk style system isn’t really better it also doesn’t necessarily mean that it is lost forever in a silo. Before you ask, we use https://www.linen.dev/ but I’m sure there are other similar solutions by now

Those saying that StackOverflow became toxic are absolutely correct. But we should not let that be it's legacy. It is IMO still today one of the greatest achievements in terms of open data on the internet. And it's impact on making programming accessible to a large audience cannot be understated.

I once published a method for finding the closest distance between an ellipse and a point on SO: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22959698/distance-from-g... I consider it the most beautiful piece of code I've ever written and perhaps my one minor contribution to human knowledge. It uses a method I invented, is just a few lines, and converges in very few iterations. People used to reach out to me all the time with uses they had found for it, it was cited in a PhD and apparently lives in some collision plugin for unity. Haven't heard from anyone in a long time. It's also my test question for LLMs, and I've yet to see my solution regurgitated. Instead they generate some variant of Newtons method, ChatGPT 5.2 gave me an LM implementation and acknowledged that Newtons method is unstable (it is, which is why I went down the rabbit hole in the first place.) Today I don't know where I would publish such a gem. It's not something I'd bother writing up in a paper, and SO was the obvious place were people who wanted an answer to this question would look. Now there is no central repository, instead everyone individually summons the ghosts of those passed in loneliness.

The various admonitions to publish to a personal blog, while encouraging, don't really get at the 0xfaded's request which I'd summarize as follows: With no one asking questions these technical questions publicly, where, how and on what public platform will technical people find the problems that need solving so they can exercise their creativity for the benefit of all?

Clearly we need something in between the fauxpen-access of journals and the wilde west of the blogosphere, probably. Why wouldn't the faded ox publish in a paper? Idk, but I guess we need things similar to those circulars that British royal society members used to send to each other...except not reserved for a club. The web should be a natural at this. But it's either centralized -> monetized -> corrupted, or decentralized -> unindexed/niche -> forgotten fringe. What can come between?

I wonder if there could be something like a Wikipedia for programming. A bit like what the book Design Patterns did in 1994, collecting everyone's useful solutions, but on a much larger scale. Everyone shares the best strategies and algorithms for everything, and updates them when new ones come about, and we finally stop reinventing the wheel for every new project. To some extent that was Stack Overflow, and it's also GitHub, and now it's also LLMs, but not quite. May I suggest "PASTE": Patterns, Algorithms, Solutions, Techniques, and Examples. "Just copy PASTE", they'll say.

Ward Cunningham once, of all places in an Github issue [0], explained how the original C2 Wiki was seeded. > Perhaps I should explain why wiki worked. > I wrote a program in a weekend and then spent two hours a day for the next five years curating the content it held. For another five years a collection of people did the same work with love for what was there. But that was the end. A third cohort of curators did not appear. Content suffered. A heroic amount effort of a single person, and later the collective effort of a small group, worked in the mid-90es. I'm skeptical that it will be repeatable 30 years later. Despite this, it would be the type of place, that I'd like to visit on the web. :( [0] https://github.com/WardCunningham/remodeling/issues/51#issue...

> Clearly we need something in between the fauxpen-access of journals and the wilde west of the blogosphere, probably. I think GP's min-distance solution would work well as an arxiv paper that is never submitted for publication. A curated list of never-published papers, with comments by users, makes sense in this context. Not sure that arxiv itself is a good place, but something close to it in design, with user comments and response-papers could be workable. Something like RFC, but with rich content (not plain-text) and focused on things like GP published (code techniques, tricks, etc). Could even call it "circulars on computer programming" or "circulars on software engineering", etc. PS. I ran an experiment some time back, putting something on arxiv instead of github, and had to field a few comments about "this is not novel enough to be a paper" and my responses were "this is not a publishable paper, and I don't intend to submit it anywhere". IOW, this is not a new or unique problem. (See the thread here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44290315 )

There is the Journal of Open Source Software perhaps: https://joss.theoj.org/

Seriously where will we get this info anymore? I’ve depended on it for decades. No matter how obscure, I could always find a community that was talking about something I needed solved. I feel like that’s getting harder and harder every year. The balkanization of the Internet + garbage AI slop blogs overwhelming the clearly declining Google is a huge problem.

And discord is a terrible tool for knowledge collection imo. Their search is ok, but then I find myself digging through long and disjointed message threads, if replies/threading are even used at all by the participants.

It's true though, and the information was so deep and specific. Plus the communities were so legitimate and you could count on certain people appearing in threads and waiting for their input. Now the best you have are subreddits or janky Facebook groups .

This is a perfect example of an element of Q&A forums that is being lost. Another thing that I don't think we'll see as much of anymore is interaction from developers that have extensive internal knowledge on products. An example I can think of was when Eric Lippert, a developer on the C# compiler at the time, responded to a question about a "gotcha" in the language: https://stackoverflow.com/a/8899347/10470363 Developer interaction like that is going to be completely lost.

I think most relevant data that provides best answers lives in GitHub. Sometimes in code, sometimes in issues or discussions. Many libs have their docs there as well. But the information is scattered and not easy to find, and often you need multiple sources to come up with a solution to some problem.

A lot of valuable information lived/lives in email threads that might or might not be publicly archived.

The second answer cites Lippert's pre-existing blog post on the subject: https://ericlippert.com/2009/11/12/closing-over-the-loop-var... I agree that there will be some degradation here, but I also think that the developers inclined to do this kind of outreach will still find ways to do it.

I had a similar beautiful experience where an experienced programmer answered one of my elementary JavaScript typing questions when I was just starting to learn programming. He didn't need to, but he gave the most comprehensive answer possible attacking the question from various angles. He taught me the value of deeply understanding theoretical and historical aspects of computing to understand why some parts of programming exist the way they are. I'm still thankful. If this was repeated today, an LLM would have given a surface level answer, or worse yet would've done the thinking for me obliviating the question in the first place. I wrote a blog post about my experience at https://nmn.gl/blog/ai-and-learning

Had a similar experience. Asked a question about a new language feature in java 8 (parallell streams), and one of the language designers (Goetz) answered my question about the intention of how to use it. An LLM couldn't have done the same. Someone would have to ask the question and someone answer it for indexing by the LLM. If we all just ask questions in closed chats, lots of new questions will go unanswered as those with the knowledge have simply not been asked to write the answers down anywhere.

You can write a paper, submit the arxiv, and you can also make a blog post. At any rate, I agree - SO was (is?) a wonderful place for this kind of thing. I once had a professor mention that they knew me from SO because I posted a few underhanded tricks to prevent an EKF from "going singular" in production. That kind of community is going to be hard to replace, but SO isnt going anywhere, you can still ask a question and answer your own question for permanent, searchable archive.

I had a conversation with a couple accountants / tax-advisor types about them participating in something like this for their specialty. And the response was actually 100% positive because they know that there is a part of their job that the AI can never take 1) filings requires you to have a human with a government approved license 2) There is a hidden information about what tax optimization is higher or lower risk based on their information from their other clients 3) Humans want another human to make them feel good that their tax situation is taken care of well. But also many said that it would be better if one wraps this in an agency so the leads that are generated from the AI accounting questions only go to a few people instead of making it fully public stackexchange like. So +1 point -1 point for the idea of a public version.

I don't disagree completely by any means, it's an interesting point, but in your SO answer you already point to your blog post explaining it in more detail, so isn't that the answer, you'd just blog about it and not bother with SO? Then AI finding it (as opposed to already trained well enough on it, I suppose) will still point to it as did your SO answer.

Please, start a blog! Hugo + GitHub hosting makes it laughably simple. (Or pick a different stack; that’s just mine.) Even if you’re worried it’ll be sparse and crappy, isn’t an Internet full of idiosyncratic personal blogs what we all want? If you want help or encouragement, reach out: zellyn@ most places

> Please, start a blog! The second sentence of the SO post is a link to their blog where it was posted originally. The blog is not a replacement for the function SO served.

You should write it up and submit it to some journal officially. Doesn't matter if it mostly duplicates your own (technically unpublished) work.

I have a similar story about an interesting little advance in computing that I haven't formally published anywhere, but it's at https://cs.stackexchange.com/a/171695/50292 The question boils down to: can you simulate the bulk outcome of a sequence of priority queue operations (insert and delete-minimum) in linear time, or is O(n log n) necessary. Surprisingly, linear time is possible.

> Today I don't know where I would publish such a gem. In the same blog you published it originally, then mentioning it on whatever social media site you use? So same?

Sounds like this should live in Wikipedia somewhere on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellipse...or maybe a related but more CS focused related page.

If you ask me your blog post is basically a paper, I’d publish to arxiv.

I too, around 2012 was too much active on so, in fact, it had that counter thing continuously xyz days most of my one liners, or snippets for php are still the highest voted answers. Even now when sometimes I google something, and an answer comes up, I realize its me who asked the same question and answered it too.

I have had this experience -- twice with the same answer. There is nothing so amusing in quite this way.

> Maybe it was a culture clash but I came from newsgroups where the issue was is that someone needed help. However SO had the idea that the person who needed help wasn't as important as the normalisation of the dataset. Yes, because doing things that way was explicitly part of the goal, from the beginning. There are countless other places where you can directly respond to people who need help (and if you like doing that, you should stick to those places). Doing things that way has negative consequences in terms of making something that's useful for on-lookers, and causing a lot of experts to burn out or get frustrated. This is stuff that Jeff Atwood was pointing out when explaining the reason for creating SO in the first place. > I sometimes wonder how much time I could have saved for those whose questions got closed before I could answer them. It would be better to focus on saving time for yourself, by understanding the goal. Please read https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254770 and https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/429808 .

Yes, LLMs are great at answering questions, but providing reasonable answers is another matter. Can you really not think of anything that hasn't already been asked and isn't in any documentation anywhere? I can only assume you haven't been doing this very long. Fairly recently I was confronted with a Postgres problem, LLMs had no idea, it wasn't in the manual, it needed someone with years of experience. I took them IRC and someone actually helped me figure it out. Until "AI" gets to the point it has run software for years and gained experience, or it can figure out everything just by reading the source code of something like Postgres, it won't be useful for stuff that hasn't been asked before.

I think you overestimate 2 by a longshot most problems only appear novel because they couched in a special field, framework or terminology, otherwise it would be years of incremental work. Some are, they are more appropriately put in a recreational journal or BB. The reason the "experts" hung around SO was to smooth over the little things. This create a somewhat virtuous cycle, but required too much moderation and as other have pointed out, ultimately unsustainable even before the release of LLMs.

I do use Claude a lot, but I still regularly ask questions on https://bioinformatics.stackexchange.com/ . It's often just too niche, LLMs hallucinate stuff like an entire non-existent benchmarking feature in Snakemake, or can't explain how I should get transcriptome aligners to give me correct quantifications for a transcript. I guess it's too niche. And as a lonely Bioinformatician it can be nice to get confirmation from other bioinformaticians. Looking back at my Stack Exchange/Stack Overflow (never really got the difference) history, my earlier, more general programming questions from when I just started are all no-brainers for any LLM.

I was tasked to add OpenOffice's hyphenation lib to our software at work back in 2010 when I was a junior dev. I had to read the paper and the C code/documentation to understand how it works but got stuck in one particular function. It was such an obscure thing (compare to web dev stuffs) that I couldn't find anything on Google. Had no choice but to ask on Stackoverflow and expected no answers. To my surprise, I got a legit answer from someone knowledgable, and it absolutely solve my problem at the time. (The function has to do with the German language, which was why I didn't understand the documentation) It was a fond memory of the site for me.

One thing you won’t get with in an LLM is genuine research. I once answered a 550 point question by researching the source code of vim to see how the poster’s question could be resolved. [0] [0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/619423/backup-restore-th...

Are we in the age of all CS problems being solved and everything being invented? Even if so, do LLM incorporate all that knowledge? A lot of my knowledge in CS come from books and lectures, LLMs can shine in that area by scraping all those sources. However SO was less about academic knowledge but more about experience sharing. You won't find recipes for complex problems in books, e.g. how to catch what part of my program corrupts memory for variable 'a' in gdb. LLMs know correct answer to this question because someone shared their experience, including SO. Are we Ok with stopping this process of sharing from one human to another?

I find this quite worrying: with this much decline SO might end up disappearing. This would be a very bad thing because in some answers there are important details and nuances that you only see by looking at secondary answers and comments. Also, this seems to imply that most people will just accept the solutions proposed by LLMs without checking them, or ever talking about the subject with other humans.

It's unfortunate that SO hasn't found a way to leverage LLMs. Lots of questions benefit from some initial search, which is hard enough that moderators likely felt frustrated with actual duplicates, or close enough duplicates, and LLMs seem able to assist. However I hope we don't lose the rare gem answers that SO also had, those expert responses that share not just a programming solution but deeper insight.

I am surprised at the amount of hate for Stack Overflow here. As a developer I can't think of a single website that has helped me as much over the last ten years. It has had a huge benefit for the development community, and I for one will mourn its loss. I do wonder where answers will come from in the future. As others have noted in this thread, documentation is often missing, or incorrect. SO collected the experiences of actual users solving real problems. Will AI share experiences in a similar way? In principle it could, and in practice I think it will need to. The shared knowledge of SO made all developers more productive. In an AI coded future there will need to be a way for new knowledge to be shared.

Someone needs to archive the entirety of StackOverflow and make it available over torrent so that it can be preserved when the site shuts down. Urgently.

https://archive.org/details/stackexchange Found it

https://archive.org/details/stackexchange_20250930 > As of (and including) the 2025-06-30 data dump, Stack Exchange has started including watermarking/data poisoning in the data. At the time of writing, this does not appear to apply to the 2025-09-30 data dump. The format(s), the dates for affected data dumps, and by extension how the garbage data can be filtered out, are described in this community-compiled list: https://github.com/LunarWatcher/se-data-dump-transformer/blo... . If the 2025-09-30 data dump turns out to be poisoned as well, that's where an update will be added. For obvious reasons, the torrent cannot be updated once created.

TFMs are not a thing anymore. Most of them are merely collections of sparse random dots one might join by sheer luck only, granted no other knowledge of the system being attempted to document.

Now that StackOverflow has been killed (in part) by LLMs, how will we train future models? Will public GitHub repos be enough? Precise troubleshooting data is getting rare, GitHub issues are the last place where it lives nowadays.

They would just use documentation. I know there is some synthesis they would lose in the training process but I’m often sending Claude through the context7 MCP to learn documentation for packages that didn’t exist, and it nearly always solves the problem for me.

The brilliance of StackOverflow was in being the place to find out how to do tricky workarounds for functionality that either wasn't documented or was buggy such that workarounds were needed to make it actually work. Software quality is now generally a bit better than it was in 2010, but that need is ultimately still there.

Was already dying a decade ago, but AI pretty much guarantees we'll never see a public forum that useful ever again. AI may be fine for people asking the basic stuff or who don't care about maintenance, but for a time SO was the place to find extraordinary and creative solutions that only a human can come up with. When you were in a jam and found a gem on there it not only solved your problem, but brought clarity and deep knowledge to your entire situation in ways that I've never seen an LLM do. It inspired you to refactor the code that got you into that mess to begin with and you grew as a developer. This timeline shows the death of a lot more than just the site itself.