6 months ago
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“StackOverflow is a dinosaur going extinct right before our eyes,” said Santiago Valdarrama, the founder of Tidely, while asking people if they even use Stack Overflow anymore. There is no doubt that developers used to love Stack Overflow, as it was the one stop solution for all of their questions. But lately, the allure is fading away.
Does anyone go to StackOverflow anymore?
I'm trying to remember, and I think I visited the site once over the last few weeks. It was probably muscle memory.
I only use Google when I want to find a website, but I never use it for answers anymore. That's what Claude and ChatGPT…
The reason is simple – No one needs to go to a website and a Q&A forum anymore to get their coding answers. Everything is there on ChatGPT, Claude, or even GitHub Copilot and Cursor. Most developers used to go to Stack Overflow because it’s a muscle memory, which in the last two years of ChatGPT is slowly getting unmemorised.
The number of Stack Overflow has gone down drastically in the last two years.
Valdarrma explained that most of his work with respect to searching and finding answers involved Googling for the right websites and going to ChatGPT or Claude for much better answers. “For coding, Cursor and Copilot do a much better job than StackOverflow ever did,” he added.
Trying Hard
To give Stack Overflow its due credit, the developer team was not sitting ducks when it comes to adopting generative AI and building coding tools. It had launched OverflowAI in a bid to compete with ChatGPT’s growing dominance, which it did by partnering with OpenAI.
As part of this partnership, OpenAI was able to leverage Stack Overflow’s OverflowAPI product to enhance model performance and gather feedback from the developer community, ensuring continuous improvement in AI development tools. Unfortunately for them, the platform ended up becoming a data repository for OpenAI on which the company trained its upcoming models like GPT-4, and possibly even the recent o1 model.
OverflowAI’s API access even recently received a few new updates for responsibly developing AI solutions for teams using it with AI generated searches and much more.
But this collaboration with OpenAI was, and the new updates are, after a long debate within Stack Overflow’s team of how they can leverage AI within their systems, which was also accompanied by a straight out ban on ChatGPT generated answers back in the beginning of 2023.
This end of the most developer-loved website era of Stack Overflow is definitely a hard pill to swallow. The reason for a lot of its downfall was the support for rude and oversmart developers, which ruined the whole community for others.
Undeniably, when we are using LLMs for asking coding questions, we are actually using Stack Overflow implicitly via the training data underlying the LLMs. All the years of forums and discussions on Stack Overflow are now being used by LLMs, which Valdaramma added is “without any of the toxicity.”
Long Live Stack Overflow in Our Data
Ignoring all of these problems, developers sometimes choose to still go on Stack Overflow when they are looking for specific solutions and more importantly, want to understand things from the perspective of other developers.
This also seems to be something that OpenAI’s o1 reasoning and thinking model might quickly snatch away as well. Add to that the capabilities of Cursor, Claude, and GitHub Copilot, which are able to now generate code by just pressing tab or natural language prompts.
At the same time, it is undeniable that people are still skeptical of adopting AI tools for coding as they fear their proprietary codes getting leaked, which is fair. “If you’re working on anything more than writing boilerplate code you go to docs and stackoverflow,” said Saurabh Kumar, engineer at Adobe. This is something that the new age AI coding tools are still not able to do. But for how long is the question.
To be clear, Stack Overflow is not dead yet. “I’m sure some people will continue visiting and engaging. But the Internet has moved on, and I don’t see how they will ever come back on top.” Probably, one thing that can save Stack Overflow from its demise is using AI generated answers on its forum, or maybe introducing a chatbot on the platform, which given the recent updates, it seems to be planning to do.
Arguably though, it seems a little bit too late.
The most important point not to forget is that it would actually be a disaster for LLMs of the future if Stack Overflow goes down as most of the coding data that they are trained on is from the platform. And the conversation around the quality of synthetic data is still up for question.
This means that developers need to stick to Stack Overflow to keep the LLMs running for coding in the longer run. Probably, even if that comes with the frustration of joining toxic forums.
AI tools will be still writing most of the code in the future, which means that though developers can build apps quickly using them, if they have to learn coding, they probably at some point have to come to Stack Overflow. Maintaining code for your company without coding tools is actually gotten easier with the latest updates on Stack Overflow.
Maybe in the future, the only way to get coding answers in the future is to pay for the LLMs. Maybe, some would miss the free and toxic developer community.
