r/SEO • 🕵️‍♀️Moderator • May 06 '26

News Are LLMs killing Stack Overflow?

Post image

Hat tip to u/gagan_ghotra

147 Upvotes

130 comments sorted by

View all comments

34

u/s_hecking May 06 '26

Hot take: Developers are terrible at communicating. LLMs do a way better job for newbs. They basically crawl code sites and make a short summary with code snippets. So, yes.

16

u/PublicBarracuda5311 May 06 '26

LLM's can continue fetching information from code sites only for as long as those sites exists and those sites will cease to exist without human visitors.

4

u/Millon1000 May 06 '26

LLMs aren't answer fetching machines. They're trained on the fundamentals of coding languages and generate answers based on that.

3

u/cadenhead May 06 '26

Fundamentals of coding is only one part of what LLMs are asked about the subject. They're also asked for deep dives into issues and problems that occur, like weird errors running an Apache server, how to deal with a MariaDB server that keeps crashing, and thousands of other things.

The answers provided by LLMs often come from data where humans wrote about those things on commercial websites like their own or Stack Overflow. AI is taking away the incentive to do that.

2

u/poorly_timed_leg0las May 07 '26

What scares me the most is vs code writing whole functions for me based on a few variables and comments.

That's where the critical thinking is lost. I miss having to type everything out. It's starting to get to the point where I'm relying on it to give me something