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by illusiveman 187 days ago
Does stack overflow still exist?

I mean, it's there any genuine case you can cover with SO that you cannot with your favorite LLM?

Because where a LLM falls short is in the same topic SO fell short: highly technical questions about a particular technology or tool, where your best chance to get the answer you were looking for is asking in their GitHub repo or contacting the maintainers.
3 comments
jve 187 days ago
SO is actually a great resource to train your LLM on :)

"We've got an egg, why do we still need the chicken, eh?"

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lonelyasacloud 187 days ago
>> I mean, it's there any genuine case you can cover with SO that you cannot with your favorite LLM?

Perhaps better than current models at detecting and pushing back when it sounds like the individual asking the question is thinking of doing something silly/dubious/debatable.

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falcor84 187 days ago
The main benefit for me is of the upvotes and comments telling me which solutions/approaches are better than others and why. Present day LLMs on their own don't have that context, nor the critical thinking.

As I see it, the next step is a synthesis of the two, whereby StackOverflow (or a competitor) reverses their ban on GenAI [0] and explicitly accepts AI users. I'm thinking that for moderation purposes, these would have to be explicitly marked as AIs, and would have to be "sponsored" by a proven-human StackOverflow user of good standing. Other than that, the AI users would act exactly as human users, being able to add questions, answers and comments, as well as to upvote and downvote other entries, based on the existing (or modified) reputation system.

I imagine for example, that for any non-sensitive open source project that I'm using Claude Code for, I would give it explicit permissions to interact on SO: for any difficult issue it encounters, it would try to find an existing question that might be relevant, if so, try the answers there, and upvote/comment about those, or to create a new question, and either get good answers from others, or to self-answer it, if it later found its own solution.

[0] https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421831/policy-gener...

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