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I’ve been on SO like ten times altogether since ChatGPT came out. It’s so much nicer than the condescending pricks of Stack Overflow. My favourite is when some genius links a question as a duplicate of something that’s vaguely similar.
This question was already answered 10 years ago in a completely different version of the programming language to the one you’re using, and we know it doesn’t work anymore, in fact hasn’t for 8 years, but we’re going to close it anyway because screw you.
Also you should be doing it in Rust anyway
my first thought about it too
Isn’t this when Safari and Firefox started blocking third party trackers by default?
Do they actually publish this data?
Is this finally the dusk of SO? It helps alot, but also suck alot.
Honestly SO fuelled the rise of the cut and paste developer. I won’t be that sad to see the end of it, and the LLMs that scraped it soon after.
You are also underestimating how sites like SO really helped a new generation of programmers learn. Anyone could search and learn things, whether to take a serious approach or just for a bit of fun.
I think you’re underestimating how badly it taught them. I see a lot of developers (when interviewing) that are unable to reason about code.
Lot’s of people learn how to cook by following recipes, but they don’t try to get work in catering or running restaurants. That requires a different level of understanding.
SO was the coding recipe book. It was fine for hobbyists. Not professionals.
Before they pulled up the ladder. There is NOTHING more frustrating than looking up a problem, getting the exact question you are looking for, only for the answers to say the question is locked and given a link to another malformed question which tell you to rtfm, and that this is no longer supported., try to do something else with a completely different software in a completely different way. All in an attempt to keep the question pool pure. I do not mourn SO.
Chat GPT is wonderful as a search engine for SO. It regurgitates the answers in a format easier to incorporate into your own project.
The thing I’m worried about is a lack of new answers. You need data to train an LLM, what to do if nobody is producing it?
It already uses the docs and API references
I typically visit stack overflow when encountering edge cases and bugs not covered by the documentation.
If it has learned from the source code you’d be surprised how good it is at that as well.
For docs it’s better, for other stuff it’s way worse than a human.
It’s a shame so much stuff is locked up in discord these days.
Do you mean trained on the source code, or having the source code in context?
Wonder where chatgpt will get its training data in the future, as it’s known not to extrapolate well. Where will it learn new frameworks, languages, … from?
A lot of models are being trained on “synthetic” data now, right?
Armies on paid personal generating content?
I see absolutely no problem with that.
Even when a parrot learns to parrot a parrot, the first parrot still has to be taught.
The docs. It’s what it does now a lot of the time I’ve noticed.
That works when the docs are good and clear. Otherwise, we’ll have to revert to communicating with each other for brief periods while the chat-bots train themselves on the new data.
Auto generated docs since devs don’t document?
Yeah the smaller the project the less effective this is.
But even learning from the source code is pretty effective.
Chatgpt, look at this repo and write docs
Somebody already did that but it wasn’t with chat GPT and honestly the docs were fine.
It didn’t do that thing that a lot of humans do when writing documentation which is just declare that something is true without explaining why it is true. So you end up in random PHP like land, when things just work like that okay.
I doubt it ever scraped SO, otherwise all the answers would be smth along the lines: “I cannot answer this question due to low quality effort!” closes browser window
Just wait until there’s no stack overflow to scrape.
I think it goes further than that. There’s two things happening with regard to AI and software development.
1: Stack overflow has become less common as a resource to solve problems. This, as you say has a problem of input into LLMs for future problems to solve.
2: Junior developers are being hired less because of AI. I assume the idea is that seniors will use AI in the same way they would usually use juniors. Except, they’ve done what business always does. Not think one bit about the future. Today’s senior developers are yesterdays junior developers.The combination of AI performance drop due to point 1, and the lack of new developers because of point 2 makes for potentially, a bad future for the profession.
As a senior developer I have no idea how I’d get an AI to autonomously keep a small subsystem maintained. If I was replacing junior developers, that’s what it has to do.
Everybody in my team gets to own something. What you own depends on your capability. You learn by doing. No dogsbodies doing busy work.
Everybody in my team gets to own something.
Oh I like this.
I don’t think developers are doing it. It’s managers making this kind of decision I’d say.
Junior developers are being hired less because of AI.
Where are you seeing this? I’ve not seen any evidence of that, yet.
I’ve been told about companies in the same field as mine with a hiring freeze on juniors. So it’s kinda second hand.
Closed as duplicate
Yeah. When I need additional insights on a difficult technical configuration, it’s nice to be able to speak to an artificial insufferable dipshit, rather than a real human insufferable dipshit.
The AI ones continue helping me even after I explain to them how they come across to real humans.
I hope every contractor and employee who has ever worked for that shit hole goes bankrupt, loses their home in a foreclosure auction and spends the rest of their life begging for handouts on the street.
It will recover when AI learns sneering condescension.
Down voted. If you’re just going to post a screenshot, you must include a link to the source. This is a link sharing platform.
