- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Four months ago, we asked Are LLMs making Stack Overflow irrelevant? Data at the time suggested that the answer is likely “yes:”
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Ever ask a question on SO? I tell my students to search there but never, ever ask a question. The unmitigated hostility is not what new developers need or deserve. ChatGPT won’t humiliate you for asking a question that someone else has already asked.
ChatGPT won’t humiliate you for asking a question that someone else has already asked.
I don’t know, being told what a good question that was and what a good boy I am everytime I ask a stupid question feels pretty humiliating.
(Still better than SO)
That’s a pretty recent development, isn’t it? I remember ChatGPT being a lot more matter of factly earlier on.
Yep, old ChatGPT was much more blunt and factual.
Don’t really like the recent trend of every LLM talking to me like I’m in kindergarten.
If LLMs just copied stack overflow they’d respond to every question with “Closed as duplicate. Question already answered.”
and link a slightly similar question, which’s answers can’t be used in your case, because of the small difference. also, it’s outdated since four years.
or 13 in case of python questions, and they are about python2
Four months ago, we asked Are LLMs making Stack Overflow irrelevant?
“That’s a stupid question, marked as solved.”
Not necessarily directly, many people may have abandoned learning programming because of LLMs, rather than Stack Overflow specifically.
I don’t think such trend would be so big. And anyone who has used any LLM for programming learns very quickly that those are very far from replacing anyone
People who know programming already, yes. People who are getting into it / want to get into it, see it as an amazing shortcut.
I had two working students already, who thought and communicated that they don’t really need to learn programming, because they can do it with ChatGPT / Q. It was quite infuriating.
students
When I was a student I despised the idea of typeless
varin C#. Then a few years later at my day job I fully embraced C++auto. I understand the frustration but unfortunately being wrong is part of learning
For real. You can tell how good a programmer someone is, by how good they think an LLM is at programming.
I use it to bounce ideas around with or get it to direct me in the right direction if I am stumped for further research, but it will be a cold day in Hell before I have it write more than the most gruntiest of grunt boilerplate code. It just can’t do it to a useful standard without a lot of oversight.
Same, it’s largely doing pretty much as the article implies, replacing StackOverflow for when I need the correct runes to do something specific.
So here’s what I don’t get. LLMs were trained on data from places like SO. SO starts losing users ,and thus content. Content that LLMs ingest to stay relevant.
So where will LLMs get their content after a certain point? Especially for new things that may come out or unique situations. It’s not like it’ll scrape the answer from a web page if people are just asking LLMs.
The need for the service that SO provided won’t go away. Eventually people will migrate to new places to discuss. LLM creators will either constantly scrape those as well, forcing them to implement more and more countermeasures and GenAI-poison, or the services themselves will enshittify and sell our content (i.e. the commons) to LLM-creators.
I worry that the replacement is more likely a move to platforms like Discord. I mean it’s already happened in a lot of projects.
Discord is terrible for this.
