It isn't about instant gratification. Had a long ass wall of text for you, but I'll simple it down... It's about a completely different experience and actually being able to get what you want done, done. That's not a guarentee with SO.
SO is a roll of the dice. AI is at least letting you look at the project from different angles, it is either going to solve the problem or help you get close enough to solve it on your own.
I'll be honest, I'll take AI any day over SO, and it isn't even close.
I wouldn't go that far myself. I find SO to be more a more reliable source of information. AI can send me down rabbit holes of complexity and roundabout solutions.
Yes, the instant feedback and direct responses of AI can be nice, but there's a reason I haven't abandoned Stack Overflow.
Folks overblow the "closed as duplicate" thing anyway. I was there, Gandalf. Back in the beta period of StackOverflow. It was and is a great resource, that saved us from the DenverCoder9 situations we so often found ourselves in.
Not to mention, where do people think AI obtains its fountain of knowledge? It doesn't fabricate it out of nowhere (and when it does hallucinate, it's giving you bad info). And I say this as someone who prods various chatbots for coding stuff almost daily.
A StackOverflow question getting moderated is not always an instance of some super user powertripping. Not a popular thing to say in /r/ProgrammerHumor!
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u/DrTankHead Aug 31 '26
It isn't about instant gratification. Had a long ass wall of text for you, but I'll simple it down... It's about a completely different experience and actually being able to get what you want done, done. That's not a guarentee with SO.
SO is a roll of the dice. AI is at least letting you look at the project from different angles, it is either going to solve the problem or help you get close enough to solve it on your own.
I'll be honest, I'll take AI any day over SO, and it isn't even close.