Over the past one and a half years, Stack Overflow has lost around 50% of its traffic. This decline is similarly reflected in site usage, with approximately a 50% decrease in the number of questions and answers, as well as the number of votes these posts receive.
The charts below show the usage represented by a moving average of 49 days.
What happened?
and copilot and chatgpt give good enough answers without being unfriendly
Exactly this. SO is now just a repository of answers that ChatGPT and it’s ilk can train against. A high percentage is questions that SO users need answers to are already asked and answered. New and novel problems arise so infrequently thanks to the way modern tech companies are structured that an AI that can read and train on the existing answers and update itself periodically is all most people need anymore… (I realize that was rambling, I hope it made sense)
yes! this! is chatgpt intelligent: no! does it more often than not give good enough answers to daily but somewhat obscure ans specific programming questions: yes! is a person on SO intelligent: maybe. do they give good enough answers to daily but somewhat obscure ans specific programming questions: mostly
Its not great for complex stuff, but for quick questions if you are stuck. the answers are given quicker, without snark and usually work
So soon they will start responding with “this has been asked before, let’s change the subject”
Exactly! It will all come full circle
ChatGPT has no knowledge of the answers it gives. It is simply a text completion algorithm. It is fundamentally the same as the thing above your phone keyboard that suggests words as you type, just with much more training data.
Who cares? It still gives me the answers i am looking for.
Yeah it gives you the answers you ask it to give you. It doesn’t matter if they are true or not, only if they look like the thing you’re looking for.
What point are you trying to make? LLMs are incredibly useful tools
Yeah for generating prose, not for solving technical problems.
You’ve never actually used them properly then.
One example is writing complex regex. A simple well written prompt can get you 90% the way there. It’s a huge time saver.
It’s great a writing boilerplate code so I can spend more of my time architecturing solutions instead of typing.