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Comment by scubadude | Hacker News Reader

> Stack Overflow has to be actually dead at this point. There's no reason to go there, or even Google, anymore.

If, like the meme, you just copied from SO without using your brain then yes AI is comparable.

If you appreciate SO for the discussion (peer review) about the answers and contrasting approaches sometimes out of left field, well good luck because AI can't and won't give you that.

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There is some very deep knowledge in SO's comments and some lower rated replies. But I suspect that is not what was making Stackoverflow so popular.

I suspect the new Stack Overflow is Discord channels, at least for some platforms/frameworks. Too bad the free-form non-threaded discussion format of Discord makes things so hard to follow.

If a company uses discord for support, then I am not using their product, unless it is a computer game. It is that simple.

Yes, very much this. I liked having 5 different approaches, and discussions of which one works best, rather than having an AI select one to use.

The give and take of contrasting views is certainly lost by LLMs, which create the illusion of a consensus answer to any question.

Every time I probe LLMs on questions on fields in which I have expertise, it goes the same way.

They give me some sort of American news media "both sides" type of summary. The answer is always a variation of "it's not one thing, it's many" and the many things are all the opinions that exist on the topic as if they were all equivalent.

Since when does SO have good discussions?

They used to, but in the past few years all I've ever gotten on the site is downvotes and close flags. No one is interested in actually answering questions, let alone discussing them: the site has trained everyone to become pedantic bureaucrats instead.

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