[biggestfan]

"49,000+" makes this the least responses the survey has gotten since 2016 ("over fifty thousand"), every year in between has been in the 65-100k range. Seems as though enthusiasm around SO has diminished significantly over the past year.

My guess is that pro-AI devs have abandoned the site, and anti-AI devs are upset with their collaboration with AI companies.

[lenerdenator]

GitHub Copilot and Cline are significantly less condescending.

[ASalazarMX]

If SO disappeared, I wonder what effect it would have in the training of LLMs as languages and tooling continue to evolve.

[lenerdenator]

I feel like the main corpus for GHCP, at least, is probably just GitHub.

SO is filled with all sorts of questions from 10-15 years ago that aren't up-to-date with the languages and tooling of today. If you develop in a language that is substantially different from what it used to be (JavaScript, Python, etc.) that is problematic.

[unwise-exe]

The site got to be a pain to try to participate in long before modern AI came around.

[pelagicAustral]

This is the first year I didn't care to participate, but I've been away from SO for about 4 years now.

[hu3]

I can repeat the same question to AI all day and it is happy to help me.

[ASalazarMX]

Which is something you shouldn't ever do to a human. SO made you search and think before posting, while AI trains people to outsource thinking.

For all its failings, SO strived for a very high signal-to-noise ratio, and it achieved it.

[johnisgood]

As others have said this before, AI is a tool and it is not supposed to nor should replace thinking. Unfortunately many people does not abide by this. See the other submission where people made a 128k line PR to a project: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44729461.

It is clear that the guy responsible for this PR outsourced thinking. I would call it "misuse of LLMs". LLMs get a bad rep because of individuals who completely outsource thinking.

[mathattack]

Some added commentary on the concentration of programming languages: https://open.substack.com/pub/therosen/p/analyzing-the-stack...

[phendrenad2]

I think people are abandoning SO because AI often gives better answers. And also SO search results on Google just got so much worse a few years ago, you search Google for "how to do X in framework Y" and get SO results about doing X in framework Z.