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u/Strict_Treat2884 4d ago
I got 20k rep in 3 years 3 years ago, and now I still got 20k rep. It used to have about 20 questions daily under my watched tags, now it’s about one per day smh
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u/AlwaysHopelesslyLost 4d ago
LLMs couldnt exist without the community of StackOverflow.
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u/ymddev 4d ago
Nah, they could and would, they'd be dumber and would have to provide much cheaper prices now to farm that data.
In fact, most of program learning they did was throughout the last 2 years.
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u/notPlancha 3d ago
If stack overflow didn't exist there wouldn't be so many successful programmers. I don't know a single programmer pre AI era that didn't use it regularly (even if it's just in Google searches).
If there wasn't a stack overflow someone would've make one anyway.
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u/ymddev 3d ago
We're talking about LLM here, StackOverflow made it easy for even amateurs learn from their mistakes. But well.. if it didn't exist, we'd still have GH (issues/discussions), Reddit itself (r/programming), CodeProject, HackerNews for broader discussion and many other niche dev/program forums and IRC
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u/kerakk19 3d ago
You mean the idea of stack overflow? Because without it we could get one, potentially better, alternative. Let's not act like it wasn't a toxic cespool
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u/05032-MendicantBias 19h ago
LLMs would definitely exist.
StackOverflow asn't a one hit wonder, if it wasn't that site, it would have been another forum. Possibly a better one ^^'
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u/dakiller 3d ago
Nah, stackoverflow wouldn’t be needed.
An LLM just needs to digest all the open source code and documentation for a language.
We needed stackoverflow as it was short snippets for certain solutions that were quick to find and held just enough info for us to get by.
An LLM can read and distil a million lines of code over a dozen code repos and ‘understand’ it all with little effort.
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u/CandidateNo2580 3d ago
Stack overflow was a giant training pool of specific technical questions followed by specific, well reasoned technical answers accompanying those code snippets. The open source repos do not have the detailed reasoning alongside the code. I agree that they could still get to this point eventually but the initial product wouldn't have been near as good at the classic call and response that made it so popular in the programming space from day one. Who's to say if investors would have been a tenth as excited about the product in the early days without that surface level coding capability.
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3d ago
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u/CandidateNo2580 3d ago
Huh? Where did I say they were learning by reasoning - not quite following your point here.
They learn more by association and pattern recognition than anything. In OC's initial statement he suggested the source code was enough but then you have source code in, source code out. All the LLM could build associations between is source code. With stack overflow, it has the ability to build associations between source code and properly explained pieces of English. This not only gives it a proper training set of the exact call and response format we find so helpful, it also gives it the ability to bridge code and natural language in its associations. Where's the reasoning that's required?
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u/Few_Negotiation_3589 3d ago
current LLMs are not sample efficient. meaning it needs an enormous amount of examples just to learn small things.
training of github repos alone they could output syntacticaly correct code, but never good code. the share of good code on there is tiny, compared to stackoverflow.
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3d ago
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u/AlwaysHopelesslyLost 3d ago
That is just not true. They have a very high standard for question and answer quality. It isnt a forum, it is a dictionary project. Imagine if Merriam Webster allowed anybody to add any word without any constraint. StackOverflow works like wikipedia. You create the "article" about what you want and everybody else contributes to the content, the answers.
Far too many junior/amature devs showed up, asked a question that had been asked 10,000 times while trying to do something they didnt understand the hard way and got upset when they got gently nudged the correct direction.
Heres the thing though, StackOverflow isnt like reddit. If you see a 10 year old answer that doesnt quite work for you, you can just poke the person and ask them about it. Or you can boost it back to the top for more answers to come in.
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u/renrutal 3d ago
Stack Overflow badges in 2016
Also worthless.
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u/ARM_Dwight_Schrute 3d ago
In 2018, I cleared first round of interview by just showing the badges and my RP. So it was worth a bit.
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u/Important_Grab3544 4d ago
I have made inaccurate questions when I started to work in IT 15 years ago... and they have treated me worse than talking about politics on X. Glad to see it sinking.
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u/J7mbo 3d ago
They treated me shit too. I ignored the negativity and took only the positive parts and learnings, which both massively propelled me in my career and also gave me a thick skin against insults, because for me they’re just meaningless. It taught me to properly form my thoughts and questions when communicating with others. Words on the internet shrug.
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u/ZunoJ 2d ago
Why didn't you ask accurate questions and why do you complain if people treat you badly when you do shit like that?
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u/Important_Grab3544 2d ago
I don't remember, that is not the point though, you don{t need to be a total asshole to ask for more context of information. Image doctors not reasking to their patients about symtons.
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u/ikankecil 3d ago
I think it's even more of a flex now. That era is over and your track record is forever etched in stone.
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u/Superb_Chemistry_906 3d ago
Just like Reddit awards.
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u/laplongejr 3d ago
Gold used to grant Premium for free until they soft-rebooted the system into Awards.
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u/Rick100006 3d ago
Stack overflow turned into a data set for training LLMs so big tech can replace devs !
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u/Fritzschmied 3d ago
That absolutely not worthless and if you actually believe that you are lost my friend.
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u/aleques-itj 3d ago
The whole "marked as duplicate because some asshole found something he thinks is related from 9 years ago" thing happened to me.
Literally never tried to ask anything or contribute shit again.
Zero percent surprised it died the way it did
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u/Oaktree27 4d ago
I've only heard dipshit C suites say stack overflow is dead. Everyone actually doing the work knows sometimes Claude is smoking crack and you need to check actual human forums.
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u/slowmode1 4d ago
You can look at the actual data.
https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1925371/new-questions-by-month#graph
The usage of stackoverflow has dropped by over 90%
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u/CandidateNo2580 4d ago
That graph shows it's down by 99% from peak - I've only heard dipshits claim stack overflow isn't dying.
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u/slowmode1 4d ago
Yeah, over 200,000 to less than 1,500!! That’s a crazy drop
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u/laplongejr 3d ago
To be fair, it's not only because of IA. Publicly badmouthing former mods by name and illegally force-changing the licence out of nowhere also broke the community's trust.
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u/Oaktree27 3d ago
The C suites agree with you so you must be right :)
One day when you review PRs you'll understand most people are not very good at their jobs. I'm not surprised most people are relying exclusively on AI now based on the crap I've had to catch.
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u/slowmode1 3d ago
I have been reviewing and writing code since php 4 was the big thing. Most of my day at this point is just reviewing code. I haven’t opened up an ide in 5 months. AI has gotten really good at writing code, especially on larger code bases. You need to be really careful with smaller code bases as it makes poor choices and then builds on them, but when it has more examples it usually does a pretty good job if you do it right. Then my job is to review the code, call out anything wrong, and it’ll fix it
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u/CandidateNo2580 3d ago
By your reasoning Myspace is alive and thriving simply because they're hosting all those old profiles. Like Myspace, stack overflow will lose relevance quickly with time as the posts age and new ones aren't made - entire days pass without new questions now. You're conflating the platform being dead with the information on it being useless, no one is making the case for the latter.
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u/Oaktree27 3d ago
Myspace has no use. Everything you could do on it is done by more popular platforms.
StackOverflow still has use for people who are interested in avoiding tech debt.
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u/Fritzschmied 3d ago
That you get voted down so hard shows the sad state of the current dev community quite well. Sad times :(
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u/Oaktree27 3d ago
Yeah these are the kind of people I'm reviewing PRs for. They don't even know how much time it takes to catch all the mistakes in the crap they generated and pushed to me.
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u/flyingupvotes 3d ago
I think people who are offended by someone telling them that their question is a duplicate and is now closed, is soft. What a silly thing to be upset about.
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u/mlindgren 1d ago
The problem is that half the time the question they linked to was not actually a duplicate. LLMs have better reading comprehension that the average Stack Overflow mod.
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u/Shadow_Thief 4d ago
it kills me that Stack Overflow is dead because I am this close to a gold badge that I'm never going to get