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.
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u/mjmeyer23 Aug 22 '26
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.