Are LLMs making StackOverflow irrelevant? | Hacker News Reader

Are LLMs making StackOverflow irrelevant?

blog.pragmaticengineer.com

13 pointshealsdata11 comments

I've been using LLM's to do searches for awhile, its quicker and i get better results. What happens in the future when new issues are only mentioned in github, x or reddit, and a different LLM is trained on each, have to use 3 searches?

The problem with LLMs as a replacement for StackOverflow (and any other peer reviewed Q/A site) is that the LLM has, shocker, no peer review. Combined with the fact that the user has insufficient expertise to adequately vet the responses (ie: they needed to ask in the first place), there is a trap where the user can end up using an incorrect response without any expert feedback to help them make an informed choice. As the LLMs get better, I expect that this will improve, but for now, it's gonna train a lot of novices to apply bad practices.

I posted a similar plot showing the steep decline of SO questions on https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/432618/395857 two weeks ago and surprise surprise, it got removed by a mod... Can still see on https://web.archive.org/web/20250110231518/https://meta.stac...

Meanwhile on https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/384652/178179, it's pretty clear that the few remaining Stack Exchange users are strongly against using LLMs regardless how good LLMs become. Luddites 2.0

No, because anytime I would find a solution on SO use that solution even with modification in my own code, I would link directly to the solution so that there's a chain of understanding what the solution is and why it works.

I can never do that with something spit out by some spicy autocomplete, which is one reason I never use LLMs.

OpenAI took all of StackOverflow's content to train their LLM, and now it's clear they stole their audience and revenue, too.

StackOverflow was in a downward spiral regardless. Without LLMs, it would take a few more years, but nothing would change. Their content moderation policies were poor, driving people away.

So the solution to the downward spiral is to strip-mine the source and leave a giant hole? No effort into shoring up and preserving the existing resource?

The existing resource was already dead. It had turned into little fiefdoms and power plays because of how perms were handed out.

These responses remind me a bit of how colonial settlers in North America justified their actions by saying the natives weren't "using" the land and resources. This of course was after the indigenous population had been devastated by smallpox and other diseases.

Nobody's stopping the owners of SO from making improvements to address the downward spiral -- it's a problem that is entirely of their own making.

I'm surprised that ChatGPT is able to answer questions directly unlike on StackOverflow where so many questions are met with "But why would you want to do that? Clearly what you want to do is <insert over-engineered architecture to solve simple problem>."

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