[ericmay]

It’s kind of related because AI tools are for better or worse going to eat up a bunch of these question/answer responses from tools like Stack Overflow for developers, particularly for trivial things.

Like “how do I create a list of HTML Bootstrap cards for my whatever app” can get someone either the correct answer or close to 90% much, much faster than Google -> Stack Overflow -> Reading through mostly useless comments as most of the answers are either outdated, better answered via docs, or just flat out wrong and not useful. It’s exceptionally rare to get a “human SME” to answer a question and solve a problem, and though such things definitely provide value they don’t pay the bills.

I do agree on principal that getting some sort of high ranking in Stack Overflow by using these tools is pretty lame, but then again maybe hearing that this is possible stings because it really cuts through the veil.

I’m really excited for the future. I’ll have a lot of fond memories telling future generations that when we ran into problems we had this tool called Stack Overflow and other people would sometimes help and give you useful information. Something akin to Stack Overflow where you keep your org’s knowledge base can be useful, but then again maybe you just have an AI tool that does that instead?

[ggorlen]

> It's kind of related because AI tools are for better or worse going to eat up a bunch of these question/answer responses from tools like Stack Overflow for developers, particularly for trivial things.

I don't see the connection between 58 people being laid off and a rep farming howto.

If the parent commenter is trying to initiate a discussion about whether AI is a contributing factor in this round of layoffs at Stack Overflow, that's relevant and welcome, but I don't see any indication of that from the post.

Stack Overflow and LLMs have different use cases, with some overlap. They're complimentary resources. SO is not a free code-writing service, although it's often been mistaken for and abused as such. "How do I create a list of HTML Bootstrap cards for my whatever app", would be closed as off-topic. It's basically a work request for a freelancer or an LLM. The goal of SO is to curate a repository of programming knowledge based on focused, specific, well-researched technical questions. It's served me very well in this purpose over the years and continues to post-LLM boom. Many questions deal with up-to-the-date issues that are beyond LLM training sets, and crowd-vetted answers generally don't hallucinate.

I'm happy to see LLMs take care of the trivial cases you mention. They're good for many drudge tasks. Typos, syntax errors and misunderstandings that would be resolved by a quick glance at the docs or an LLM are not really a good fit for SO, unless they're common. Prompting an AI should be among the expected prerequisite attempts before asking SO.

A recent personal example of SO at its best was a question[1] based on a regression bug caused by a couple-day-old deploy to the Puppeteer browser automation library, a tag I answer questions in daily. I reproduced the problem, forked the repo, fixed the issue, opened a PR and the patch was deployed to NPM the next morning. Given the same input, LLMs will pretend like they know what they're talking about and give you the run-around endlessly, providing random, plausible-looking nonsense for as long as you have patience to put up with it. Only humans can handle this type of problem at the moment. And this isn't an isolated example.

> hearing that this is possible stings because it really cuts through the veil.

Cheating with LLMs is not possible currently. These answers stick out like a sore thumb. It's just more work for the community to clean up the LLM garbage being dumped on us. I'm not sure what "veil" you're referring to--the reason LLMs are banned is because they don't meet the site's standards for quality and accuracy. If LLMs were objectively better at doing what SO does across the board, SO would be a ghost town by now.

Some day, LLMs may well replace humans (fully, or to a large extent) at programming, but I don't think it'll happen as soon as commenters seem to imply, judging by the quality of LLM answers I've seen and my experience using ChatGPT. And if LLMs do replace humans, fine, life will go on, but that day hasn't arrived yet so it's premature to bury human programming Q&A in general or SO specifically.

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/75292123/why-does-puppee...

[ericmay]

It seems like you are pretty invested in Stack Overflow. At best I got marginal use out of it so I don’t care for the site one way or another. For most questions where I’d use Stack Overflow (dev stuff) for I simply get a just as good of an answer or hint much faster using Chat-GPT so much so that I just use that to start with, or if it’s a unique problem to an organization I work for I can’t use Stack Overflow really anyway because the question is too specific.

A flow in the past might have been Google “question content or error message or something” -> Stack Overflow links to browse through until something plausible shines through -> problem solved

Now it’s more like Chat-GPT (problem probably solved, or additional details to Chat-GPT) -> Google -> Stack Overflow

Even if tools like Chat-GPT were half as good as Stack Overflow they are vastly more efficient and since I know what I’m doing or looking for I can sniff out how plausible something is (no difference with Stack Overflow today).

I get that you have had a great experience on the site and truly it delivers value for a lot of people!

But I don’t see how such things keep the lights on at Stack Overflow.

The reason the OP is relevant is because even if you think you can identify the answers today it won’t be long before you can’t. It follows the principal that it’s easier to destroy stuff than build it.

If Stack Overflow wants to survive in any form it probably needs to Verify Human and eliminate any method in which someone can interact with the site (content-wise) except hands on keyboard.

Personally I’ve found the so-called human responses to be +- useful compared to Chat-GPT on any given topic I use it for and the only way I come to believe they’re human responses is because of the time stamp.

For example you say:

> …LLMs will pretend like they know what they're talking about and give you the run-around endlessly, providing random, plausible-looking nonsense for as long as you have patience to put up with it

I honestly think you can just plug in “contributors to most Stack Overflow questions” in to this sentence and it’s equally true.

You are focusing on the 1% of cases like in your example. I’m looking at most cases.