It's the same behaviour of course, blindly copy/pasting errors into ChatGPT, unquestioningly copying output back, and as far as I can tell the results don't seem to be that much better, just quicker.
It's the same behaviour of course, blindly copy/pasting errors into ChatGPT, unquestioningly copying output back, and as far as I can tell the results don't seem to be that much better, just quicker.
1) Nobody thinks that Stack Overflow is a magic oracle. Most people do think that ChatGPT is.
2) Quality of Stack Overflow answers can be quickly judged by looking at upvotes. Lots of upvotes does not guarantee that an answer is quality, but it is a signal that is very useful especially when you aren't capable of judging the answer yourself.
This is actually a shame, as lots of very knowledgeable and helpful people have answered questions over the years on SO, and sometimes the comments and discussions are just as useful as the accepted answer.
...but, mostly not.
Mostly, they're quite useless. ...and I say that with a considered opinion, not a knee jerk of irritation.
SO is fundamentally a site where up voting lifts relevant answers and down voting sinks irrelevant stuff.
However, comments are a side-step into non-voting, non-karma related content, that violates that fundamental premise. Comments simply give people a way to game the system; you can say unhelpful useless things, and the worst thing that can happen is the comment is flagged for moderator review. You can answer the question without it being a 'real' answer... only now it's harder to find.
The benefit of comments is entirely lost by the way they are abused in practice.
...so, realllly, if you want to chat about the solution, then chatGPT is the way to go, not SO. SO was never the place for that.
So.. you know. It's not much of a loss really, compared to what you get with a chat bot that's happy to talk to you patiently asking dumb questions literally forever. :)
After a couple of "you do know nothing, go play over there" replies, I stopped visiting and participating in SO, and even started to avoid going there because the answers' quality started to go down as well.
They tried to solve it with a CoC, better moderation, etc., but they only slowed down the process a little. In my eyes, it became a free Experts Exchange filled with people with short temper.
If I knew better, or my half day search yielded better results, I wouldn't be asking with all that I know, in that poor form. Judging me because I'm not as knowledgeable as you is not a good way to help people, it seems.
So it can't replace these sites in their entirety, because if those sites decline, so will the quality of ChatGPT responses. I suppose there will be some kind of mediocre equilibrium.
Sometimes it's a 1:1 copy of stackoverflow, sometimes it's a bit more. Either way it saves me a few minutes searching for the relevant post.
It beats searching various SO questions, some of which don't have answers, some are too old, some are hard to read.
The best part is being able to ask for further clarification, or feeding the answer into a fresh context chat to help find problems