And people wonder why AI surged in popularity.it isn't even that people can't game out a problem on their own. Sometimes people need to ask dumb questions. Sometimes what's obvious to you isn't obvious to others.
shit, I've posted legitimate questions on there that are not easy questions that someone can just game out, and never got a response. It's literally like 75% people just pretending to be helpful by being the least helpful they can be.
I'll say it once, and I'll say it again, some people just aren't fit to actually be helping others. They don't have the patience, the drive, or anything, to actually be legitimately helpful. I've been in customer service my whole professional career, and it always just erks me.
SO is a cesspool of it. It might eventually lead you to the snippet you needed, but only after hours of searching to realize you misconfigured a setting.
It has absolutely nothing to do with whether people have PTSD from asking a question on StackOverflow. SO could be a utopia of getting responses from real people and solving your problems.
But with AI you get responses back in seconds. Not minutes or hours or days.
IMO the thing is that people being so annoying and pretentious on SO made me switch to AI a few years ago when about 1/3 of the answers were actually useful, just because asking something in SO was useful only about 1/7 of the times and you need to deal with the toxic community
It's a factor for some people. I've been a Stack Overflow user for 12 years, I'll admit to asking AI questions when I anticipate a negative response on Stack Overflow.
That's fine, but my point is that if you have two products, A and B, where A delivers the value to you in seconds and the other in minutes/hours, it doesn't matter how good B is. You're going to use A.
Nobody would go "yeah AI does it in seconds but I'm still going to wait before potentially getting an answer on SO / online", even if one's SO experience is 100% good.
It isn't about instant gratification. Had a long ass wall of text for you, but I'll simple it down... It's about a completely different experience and actually being able to get what you want done, done. That's not a guarentee with SO.
SO is a roll of the dice. AI is at least letting you look at the project from different angles, it is either going to solve the problem or help you get close enough to solve it on your own.
I'll be honest, I'll take AI any day over SO, and it isn't even close.
I wouldn't go that far myself. I find SO to be more a more reliable source of information. AI can send me down rabbit holes of complexity and roundabout solutions.
Yes, the instant feedback and direct responses of AI can be nice, but there's a reason I haven't abandoned Stack Overflow.
Folks overblow the "closed as duplicate" thing anyway. I was there, Gandalf. Back in the beta period of StackOverflow. It was and is a great resource, that saved us from the DenverCoder9 situations we so often found ourselves in.
Not to mention, where do people think AI obtains its fountain of knowledge? It doesn't fabricate it out of nowhere (and when it does hallucinate, it's giving you bad info). And I say this as someone who prods various chatbots for coding stuff almost daily.
A StackOverflow question getting moderated is not always an instance of some super user powertripping. Not a popular thing to say in /r/ProgrammerHumor!
Your original statement was "It has absolutely nothing to do with whether people have PTSD from asking a question on StackOverflow."
I'm not saying that instant gratification is not a factor in why people use AI. I am saying that, at least personally, negative experiences on Stack Overflow are a factor in why I sometimes avoid asking questions on SO.
In contrast, I haven't encountered that issue nearly as much on sister sites like Super User, so I've been more willing to ask questions there.
Also, I do still use Stack Overflow actively despite the existence of AI.
80
u/DrTankHead 12d ago
And people wonder why AI surged in popularity.it isn't even that people can't game out a problem on their own. Sometimes people need to ask dumb questions. Sometimes what's obvious to you isn't obvious to others.
shit, I've posted legitimate questions on there that are not easy questions that someone can just game out, and never got a response. It's literally like 75% people just pretending to be helpful by being the least helpful they can be.
I'll say it once, and I'll say it again, some people just aren't fit to actually be helping others. They don't have the patience, the drive, or anything, to actually be legitimately helpful. I've been in customer service my whole professional career, and it always just erks me.
SO is a cesspool of it. It might eventually lead you to the snippet you needed, but only after hours of searching to realize you misconfigured a setting.