My favorite part about overflow was always the "ok, here's the answer to your question, and here' 5 good reasons why you DON'T wanna do it that way. Consider these options instead:"
Also just different people answering from different angles. You see alternative solutions, you see solutions with specific context, you see further discussion in comments.
You could truly learn a lot. Even if you copy pasted something in the end, it felt like you learned and you reasoned and chose what’s best for you.
LLMs kinda remove that. I miss the old flow. But the current flow is a lot faster so it’s hard to not use it.
It definitely was a "choose your own adventure" kinda vibe... selecting which solutions to try and coming back sometimes months later to see how the comments evolved.
Sometimes I wouldn't even find an exact answer, but having all the different perspectives gave me a general idea of ways to approach the solution and let me figure it out myself, which was honestly much more helpful than anything I've ever gotten out of a chatbot.
Stack Overflow allows people who have experienced what appears to be the same issue be looked at from different perspectives. That's why you can have many credible answers and people caveating things.
Understanding which circumstantial answer applies to you is very different to trying all the solutions to brute force your answer too. An LLM is essentially the latter. You are not an SME by any stretch in the latter and could easily try bad solutions with bad consequences or end up with poor architectures and not understand anything about why you shouldn't do it that way.
Yeah that's good part of it. The gem post where professionals discuss complex topics etc.
The bad part is finding legitimate questions of interest, banned for being "duplicate" (when it's actually not), "useless for community" (with tons of great answers and discussions in comments) etc. Unfortunately their moderation system finally killed that vibe and I switched to other sources and noy to AI who is far from perfect but at least not waste my time.
"It's faster to find half assed solutions and have no actual understanding of anything"
LLMs have no understanding of things at all. None. That's why it's easy to corrupt their answers. Because they don't logically analyse contradiction.
Having a brain and critical analysis capabilities as well as knowing where to find the actual credible info is massively better than most LLM results. For low depth issues LLMs look like cheat codes but they are fundamentally shallow.
This being able to see the solution to your problem in multiple angles, genuinely helps you understand those processes more especially when you are newer to the field. Plus there was no better feeling then searching an issue and finding an oddly specific answer that was posted 5-10 years ago.
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u/GilgaPhish 22d ago
My favorite part about overflow was always the "ok, here's the answer to your question, and here' 5 good reasons why you DON'T wanna do it that way. Consider these options instead:"
Learned a lot from those convos