178
StackOverflow activity down to 2008 numbers
(aussie.zone)
from 10b0t0mized: I miss the days when I had to go through a humiliation ritual before getting my questions answered.
Now days you can just ask your questions from an infinitely patient entity, AI is really terrible.
The fast drop yes, but really it’s been in decline for around a decade before that.
Interesting! When I first read your comment, I looked at the chart and thought “it looks to me like the drop starts at the end of 2022. Isn’t that before LLMs started being used broadly?”
Nope. Looks like ChatGPT was released in November 2022. It doesnt feel like it’s been around that long, but I guess it has.
They also announced their AI stuff in July 2023 https://stackoverflow.blog/2023/07/27/announcing-overflowai/
The drop starts in 2013, but people were certainly ready to all bail at once by the time LLMs came around.
That sucks, is there an alternative people are using? seems like it would still be a useful knowledge base to have
The common alternative is to just ask ChatGPT your software questions, get false information from the AI, and then try and push that horrible code to production anyway if my past two jobs are any indicator.
Stack Overflow is still useful to find old answers, but fucking sucks to ask new questions on. If you aren't getting an AI answer to your question, then you're getting your question deleted for some made up reason.
The real answer that everyone hates is: If you have a question about something, read the documentation and experiment with it to figure that something out. If the documentation seems wrong, submit an issue report to the devs (usually on GitHub) and see what they say.
The secondary answer is that almost everything FOSS has a slack channel or even sometimes discord channels. Go to the channels and ask people who use/make whatever tool you need help with.
If you have developers pushing bad and broken code to production your problem isn't AI.