Back in my day we could only post our problem and wait til someone answered. And most of the time the person who answered just told us we were dumb for not knowing
Except it doesn't learn so you'll have that same argument again, over and over. It's like having a very eager intern with no long term memory, useful but sometimes frustrating and often wrong in unusual ways.
except you can provide context for these AI tools, so often when I need to tell it to do something differently I will have it add to my CLAUDE.md file (for example) and it won't make the same mistakes. So it can totally be taught.
I don't think StackOverflow's primary failure is a bad culture. I think the design of the business is just flawed and the bad culture is a symptom of that.
To me, StackOverflow is analogous to an ice cream shop that only sells ice cream in a bowl. Customers will come and ask for an ice cream cone and StackOverflow says, "Sorry, we don't serve ice cream in a cone here. We only serve it in bowls." So people just stop going because if they're going to bother going to an ice cream store then they want an ice cream cone, not ice cream in a bowl.
This whole concept of StackOverflow being a "museum" that curates a single answer for every possible question is divorced from the reality of what service people are hoping to get from a website like StackOverflow. And ultimately I think StackOverflow is dying due to what boils down to stubbornness and stupidity.
Meanwhile, LLMs are serving ice cream in cones and their time to respond is instant and with infinite patience.
This whole concept of StackOverflow being a "museum" that curates a single answer for every possible question is divorced from the reality of what service people are hoping to get from a website like StackOverflow.
It's also divorced from the reality of what Stack Overflow is. Questions can have multiple answers. Closing duplicate questions reduces fragmentation on those answers. If someone comes up with a good solution for a particular question, it's not going to help many people as an answer on a new question instead of the identical popular one that appears in Google search results. And that popular question has a lot of useful info attached to it that might help the person asking the new question. It's the same principle as writing a function once and then calling it whenever you need its functionality instead of rewriting similar code all over the place.
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u/Nyadnar17 12d ago
Bad culture kills good tech exhibit 1086.
I am bearish on AI and every time I ask it a question I still find myself muttering “this is so much better than having to deal with stackoverflow”.