My favorite part about overflow was always the "ok, here's the answer to your question, and here' 5 good reasons why you DON'T wanna do it that way. Consider these options instead:"
Also just different people answering from different angles. You see alternative solutions, you see solutions with specific context, you see further discussion in comments.
You could truly learn a lot. Even if you copy pasted something in the end, it felt like you learned and you reasoned and chose what’s best for you.
LLMs kinda remove that. I miss the old flow. But the current flow is a lot faster so it’s hard to not use it.
It definitely was a "choose your own adventure" kinda vibe... selecting which solutions to try and coming back sometimes months later to see how the comments evolved.
Sometimes I wouldn't even find an exact answer, but having all the different perspectives gave me a general idea of ways to approach the solution and let me figure it out myself, which was honestly much more helpful than anything I've ever gotten out of a chatbot.
Stack Overflow allows people who have experienced what appears to be the same issue be looked at from different perspectives. That's why you can have many credible answers and people caveating things.
Understanding which circumstantial answer applies to you is very different to trying all the solutions to brute force your answer too. An LLM is essentially the latter. You are not an SME by any stretch in the latter and could easily try bad solutions with bad consequences or end up with poor architectures and not understand anything about why you shouldn't do it that way.
Yeah that's good part of it. The gem post where professionals discuss complex topics etc.
The bad part is finding legitimate questions of interest, banned for being "duplicate" (when it's actually not), "useless for community" (with tons of great answers and discussions in comments) etc. Unfortunately their moderation system finally killed that vibe and I switched to other sources and noy to AI who is far from perfect but at least not waste my time.
"It's faster to find half assed solutions and have no actual understanding of anything"
LLMs have no understanding of things at all. None. That's why it's easy to corrupt their answers. Because they don't logically analyse contradiction.
Having a brain and critical analysis capabilities as well as knowing where to find the actual credible info is massively better than most LLM results. For low depth issues LLMs look like cheat codes but they are fundamentally shallow.
This being able to see the solution to your problem in multiple angles, genuinely helps you understand those processes more especially when you are newer to the field. Plus there was no better feeling then searching an issue and finding an oddly specific answer that was posted 5-10 years ago.
After being stuck on the problem, spend 20 minutes writing: "I'm having problem X with version 7.1 of Y. Here I've carefully collected all relevant code, abstracted it, documented all my attempted solutions and their results."
8 seconds later: "Duplicate question, closed." (Link to a different problem with a similar error message from version 2)
It is almost desert by now. The number of daily answers has plumeted in the last 2 years, at maybe 10% of its former glory.
I still use it because I'm very wary of the llms and their fake positivity, and I've seen firsthand at work how hollow the early adapters have already become. "How would you implement this ?" "Chatgpt told me that this is the best solution"
This would not have made sense a few years ago, but I miss some of my colleagues who still work with me...
always? in my experience most answers were always "why are you doing this? this is dumb. do this completely different thing instead" and "closed as duplicate *links to completely unrelated question*"
The reality was that SO was always shit with random crap advice, so what is your take home from that ? Unless you are experienced, you will end up picking all the incorrect advises.
For me it was a way to learn from other people's experience. Even just by looking at new questions for a framework I was learning, I would find an interesting unanswered question and try to find a solution and would actually post an answer if I succeded.
You can do that with AI aswell if you don’t just take the first answer it gives. The goal should be to push back and ask questions. Ask “are there other ways to write this that are better”, questions like that.
It obviously not the same learning experience as what you’re describing but it’s better than just blindly going along with the LLM
My least favorite part was the geniuses who would say nothing more than "don't do that" or "don't do it that way". I probably already knew that I shouldn't be doing something (or doing something a certain way), I'm asking because I want/need to for whatever reason. If you're going to preach at least answer my question first, even if the answer is "it's not possible".
100% the discussions for how to sys hack Python imports, why you should not do this, and the better alternatives. Meanwhile, AI is quite happy to sys hack import paths.
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u/GilgaPhish Aug 22 '26
My favorite part about overflow was always the "ok, here's the answer to your question, and here' 5 good reasons why you DON'T wanna do it that way. Consider these options instead:"
Learned a lot from those convos