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by ijidak 158 days ago
Providing context to ask a Stack Overflow question was time-consuming.

In the time it takes to properly format and ask a question on Stack Overflow, an engineer can iterate through multiple bad LLM responses and eventually get to the right one.

The stats tell the uncomfortable truth. LLMs are a better overall experience than Stack Overflow, even after accounting for inaccurate answers from the LLM.

Don't forget, human answers on Stack Overflow were also often wrong or delayed by hours or days.

I think we're romanticizing the quality of the average human response on Stack Overflow.
3 comments
matt_kantor 158 days ago
The purpose of StackOverflow was never to get askers quick answers to their specific questions. Its purpose is to create a living knowledge repository of problems and solutions which future folk may benefit from. Asking a question on StackOverflow is more like adding an article to Wikipedia than pinging a colleague for help.

If someone doesn't care about contributing to such a repository then they should ask their question elsewhere (this was true even before the rise of LLMs).

StackOverflow itself attempts to explain this in various ways, but obviously not sufficiently as this is an incredibly common misconception.

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fireflash38 158 days ago
That's only because of LLMs consuming pre-existing discussions on SO. They aren't creating novel solutions.
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specproc 158 days ago
What I'm appreciating here is the quality of the _best_ human responses on SO.

There are always a number of ways to solve a problem. A good SO response gives both a path forward, and an explanation why, in the context of other possible options, this is the way to do things.

LLMs do not automatically think of performance, maintainability, edge cases etc when providing a response, in no small part because they do not think.

An LLM will write you a regex HTML parser.[0]

The stats look bleak for SO. Perhaps there's a better "experience" with LLMs, but my point is that this is to our detriment as a community.

[^0]: He comes, https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open...

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