[photochemsyn]

Almost every time I had a coding-type question for SO, I would diligently search through previous SO answers and 98% of the time I could find the answer to my question by doing so - but it would always take a long time. LLMs are just a lot faster, and while double-checking their output is necessary, that's a much quicker process than trying to hunt down answers starting from little knowledge.

There's also the issue of people trying to improve their SO score because that can impact things like job interviews, at least on the programming side, and as with any such system gaming it for high reputation (points for questions, answers, upvotes) has some side effects on people's behavior that aren't always pleasant. There's also a saturation effect, e.g. many common questions have already been asked, and the 'archive of truth' mentality means that you're supposed to search past answers before asking anything, which again tends to take a lot longer than ChatGPT does.