[rkachowski]

It's really jarring to see this wave of nostalgia for "the good old days" appear since ~2025. Suddenly these rose tinted glasses have dropped and everything before LLM usage became ubiquitous was a beautiful romantic era of human collaboration, understanding and craftsmanship.

I still acutely remember the gatekeeping and hostility of peak stack overflow, and the inanity of churning out jira tickets as fast as possible for misguided product initiatives. It's just wild yo

[mrpopo]

Probably people complaining about AI today were fine with Stack Overflow before and didn't have anything to complain about back then.

I also had a better experience with Stack Overflow over AI. It's been unable to tell me that I couldn't assign a new value to my std::optional in my specific case, and kept hallucinating copy constructor rules. A Stack Overflow question matching my problem cleared that up for me.

Sometimes you need someone to tell you no.

[ruszki]

Or, like me, the kind of questions in which I’m interested are answered in a way worse rate by LLMs than StackOverflow, like ever.

I have and had problems with StackOverflow. But LLMs are nowhere near that, and unfortunately, as we can see, StackOverflow is basically dead, and that’s very problematic with kinda new things, like Android compose. There was exactly zero time when for example Opus could answer the best options for the first time, like a simple one, like I want a zero WindowInset object… it gives an answer for sure, and completely ignores the simplest one. And that happens all the time. I’m not saying that StackOverflow was good regarding this, but it was better for sure.

[skydhash]

I don’t think I’ve ever ask a question on Stack Overflow, but I’ve consulted it several time. Even when I’ve not found my exact use case, there’s always something similar or related that gave me the right direction for research (a book or an article reference, the name of a concept to use as keyword,…)

It’s kinda the same feeling when browsing the faq of a project. It gives you a more complete sense of the domain boundaries.

I still prefer to refer to book or SO instead of asking the AI. Coherency and purposefulness matter more to me then a direct answer that may be wrong.

[rkachowski]

> A Stack Overflow question matching my problem cleared that up for me.

Perhaps if there was no question already available you'd have had a different experience. Getting clearly written and specific questions promptly closed as duplicates of related, yet distinct issues, was part of the fun.

I find that AI hallucinates in the same way that someone can be very confident and wrong at the same time, with the difference that the feedback is almost instant and there are no difficult personalities to deal with.

[mrpopo]

> someone can be very confident and wrong at the same time

And sometimes that someone can be you, and AI is notoriously bad at telling you that you're wrong (because it has to please people)

[rkachowski]

I've found recent claude code to be surprisingly good at dispelling false assumptions and incorrect framing. I say this as someone who experimented with it last summer and found it to be kinda stupid; since December last year it's turned the curve - it's not the sycophantic nonsense it used to be.

[tdb7893]

I think most people found StackOverflow to be pretty easy and useful since it's a pretty small minority of people that ever asked questions on it so many people didn't interact at all with the more annoying parts.

[LatencyKills]

MSGA: Make Software Great Again? /s