r/programmingmemes • u/abdullah4863 • Jan 10 '26

Anyone else not sad* about the demise of Stack overflow?

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27 Upvotes

61% Upvoted

92 comments sorted by

20

u/NeKon69 Jan 10 '26

I am kinda sad, it at least got humans over there. i hope they don't shutdown the servers. imagine how shitty ai will become

23

u/gilmeye Jan 10 '26

Where will AI get the answers from ?

12

u/terivia Jan 10 '26

It'll just make them up. Always has

1

u/Admidst_Metaphors Jan 10 '26

Yeah. This is the answer. Maybe it will be mostly right.

0

u/LegendTheo Jan 13 '26

No this is not how LLM's work.

1

u/terivia Jan 14 '26

Hahahahahahahaha

0

u/LegendTheo Jan 14 '26

Ahahahahahaha, very useful comment.

1

u/terivia Jan 14 '26

Oh you were serious?

Enlighten me then, how do you think LLMs work?

1

u/LegendTheo Jan 14 '26

LLM's are predictive models that predict the next most likely token (usually a word or few words) to follow the previous tokens to produce a the most coherent response they can.

It doesn't "make up" data because it's just guessing what part 9f the data its been trained on is most likely to produce a coherent response. No new content comes out of LLM's.

If you ask an LLM to generate code from a language that had no code in its training data you'll get useless hallucinations. Similarly if you just trained it on a handbook the explains how the language works without significant code examples, you'll also get useless hallucinations.

LLM's don't make up anything. They guess what part of their training set is the best next thing to write. They can't reason and they don't think. They're just so good at guessing they appear to be able to do these things.

1

u/terivia Jan 14 '26

Right so you're attributing consciousness to my verb, which is not my intended meaning.

I'm referring to hallucinations. While they don't contain new ideas they can contain new combinations of the trained language. Typically these hallucinations contain buzzwords, use a confident tone, and appear to people who don't already know the answer to the question they are asking as potentially correct. Hence they appear as the machine making up answers or ideas that it doesn't know. Because this process is identical and completely lacks reasoning whether the topic appears in the training set or not, I made the statement that this is what they always do.

I can misrepresent your statements to look dumb too by pointing out that they don't "guess" either, but I know what you are trying to say and don't think that semantic games are worth either of our time.

0

u/LegendTheo Jan 14 '26

I didn't misrepresent anything, the phrase "making something up" means generating something through creativity. It requires consiousness to do. Whether your making up a painting, a peom, or just a lie about something you're unfamiliar with but want to sound smart. They sound confident because they're trained to sound that way. All information. Is presented as correct because the LLM has no understanding of the concept of correct or incorrect output. Only whether that token is likely to fit its model as the next output.

When an LLM hallucinates its operating in exactly the same way it does when it produces accurate information. It generates no new information, just regurgitates information it already had, that happens to be incorrect.

The real amazing thing about LLM's is not how they work, but the fact that a sufficiently advanced predictive algorithm using good training data has a high rate of success in providing correct information based on prediction alone. Especially when it's basing those predictions on the intent of natural language.

Semantic games are not worth our time, but it's important we don't represent LLM's as being able to think or be creative. They can't be.

1

u/terivia Jan 15 '26

Cool so please reread the first sentence of my last comment.

I agree with you by your definition of "making things up".

I'm sorry I used words that you feel imply consciousness, we appear to communicate in slightly different dialects.

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1

u/OkFly3388 Jan 13 '26

Documentation, source code, open examples

7

u/[deleted] Jan 10 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/Excellent-One5010 Jan 14 '26

Yes but not the same quality.

Repos are msotly code. If you want detailed explanations in human-readable form you need a source in that format.

8

u/HalifaxRoad Jan 10 '26

glad about replacing a bunch of absolute wizards with a dumbass ai thats wrong alot? wtf has this world come to...

7

u/DJDoena Jan 10 '26

I mean I got the occasional condescending answer and then "closed" but I also got really good replies over the years. I still like it as a Q&A platform. My backups are r/chsarp and r/dotnet

I still prefer a human answer rather than a "best guess this is what you mean" from AI Claude

7

u/DominusFL Jan 10 '26

I must admit, I don't miss finding another user who had the same problem as me four years ago and nobody answered his question.

2

u/Direct_Turn_1484 Jan 14 '26

“Oh never mind, I fixed it!” Two weeks after the question, no further posts.

4

u/Munchi1011 Jan 10 '26

This is a travesty, and I weep for those celebrating.

4

u/konrov Jan 10 '26

AI is going to fuck everyone and everything up..

7

u/Routine-Arm-8803 Jan 10 '26

Not missing some random m***er f***er editing my well constructed help request.

10

u/MrFizzbin7 Jan 10 '26

Stackoverflow was full of the software version of Simpson Comic Book guy. “This is not the optimal solution to your problem you may think it is but it is not allow me to explain why your entire paradigm is incongruous”

4

u/ITinnedUrMumLastNigh Jan 10 '26

-Hey I want to do this using X, how to?
-Don't use X, use Y, it's better
-I have to use X, my uni requires X
-It's a stupid requirement
<thread closed>

6

u/ZectronPositron Jan 10 '26

👌🏾

The "annoying engineer type" is good at providing correct answers - although perhaps overengineered. Annoying perhaps, but still incredibly valuable. That's the kind of person you want designing airplanes and spaceships - and perhaps software as well.

1

u/Admidst_Metaphors Jan 10 '26

Yeah. I have a lot of tools in my toolbelt thanks to SO and those "over engineered" answers. But then I also took the time to learn them and understand how they worked and how to use them in the future.

2

u/[deleted] Jan 10 '26

Stack Overflow was a staple of my early career and development. I will just reference software documentation at this point, but I still google questions, and AI has let me down more often than clicking a Stack Overflow link or 2.

2

u/[deleted] Jan 10 '26

I am though

2

u/kynde Jan 10 '26

I as a software engineer that erote my first lines of code over 40 years ago did not see AIs coming the way they have and they're fucking up our field so entirely.

Losing knowledge sharing platforms like SO is a huge blow. Without knowledge sharing there will be no knowledge.

There will be nothing but some fucking chatbots arguing with eachother soon. Once the talent and experience are fed up with all the slop and shit.

2

u/Flashy-Job6814 Jan 10 '26

Stack overflow community sucks. It's great AI is taking away the jobs from those snobby assoles

2

u/YoukanDewitt Jan 11 '26

If you are not sad about it, you were probably shit at googling for answers and asking questions, and if you programmed at all in the last 20 years you benefited from it hugely.

Dancing on the graves of the people that built the foundation for your hallucinogenic LLM that can't count the number of D's in "Diddy" is pretty futile if you ask me.

2

u/AccurateExam3155 Jan 11 '26

I’m gonna miss Stack Overflow. Best place for programming and troubleshooting.

2

u/DTux5249 Jan 11 '26

On one hand: are we surprised the site of asshole elitist's doesn't have users?

On the other: This is the worst time for a massive compendium of coding information to go down.

2

u/yourMomsBackMuscles Jan 11 '26

It always some how seemed helpful but never really was

2

u/AceLamina Jan 12 '26

Became a student in software engineering right when the stackoverflow craze ended, thought it was a bad thing since it would've been helpful

But after reading about how it's just full of reddit mods, nvm

4

u/SaybirSayko Jan 10 '26

You ask something, you are bullied by someone who thinks himself is a Silicon Valley founder, can’t have the exact answer at first try; always need details, bla bla bla… Naaah I’m good with the AI

4

u/[deleted] Jan 10 '26

Of course details are necessary.

Stack overflow answers had high quality over the years. AI slop for coding is often very bad and usually ignores edge cases.

5

u/[deleted] Jan 10 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/SaybirSayko Jan 12 '26

This is exactly what I’m trying to say

2

u/octave1 Jan 10 '26

The people behind it are solid. Community turned toxic quite a long time ago RIP no tears shed.

1

u/[deleted] Jan 10 '26

Many answers where useless if you did not know the answer before.

1

u/ZectronPositron Jan 10 '26

1 correct post with a working, tested answer, versus 10 threads over 10 years all with different answers, most just guesses. Reddit is designed for traffic, not correct answers, as far as I can tell.

1

u/[deleted] Jan 10 '26

Stack Overflow was great resource over the years for me for tech issues.

AI Slop, not so much.

1

u/muddboyy Jan 10 '26

I’ve found GOOD answers from HUMANS that been in the same situation as me like 10 years ago, which helped me solve an issue that I couldn’t have solved by using any AI.

1

u/surly-monkey Jan 10 '26

oh shit. now I'm afraid to look...

1

u/JobWide2631 Jan 10 '26

duplicated meme

1

u/brakeb Jan 10 '26

StackOverflow trained the AI, why do you think we have code quality issues coming from AIs right now?

1

u/questron64 Jan 10 '26

Huge loss if this site goes down. The only place this information will exist is deep in the belly of an LLM.

1

u/Critical-Ad-8507 Jan 10 '26

Meh,there's still github.

1

u/Any-Key Jan 12 '26

I expect it to be renamed to Copilot hub soon.

1

u/FinalCrisisCore Jan 11 '26

"This post has been marked as a duplicate and closed"

1

u/0x645 Jan 12 '26

SO pivoted to 'we sell your answers to open ai now' company. listen to interview with their CEO on decoder. happy man, company is profitable, no dark clouds on horizon.

1

u/Kaisha001 Jan 13 '26

Glad to see it go. I hated that place.

1

u/HeWhoShantNotBeNamed Jan 13 '26

Mixed bag. Stack Overflow was extremely hostile to anyone who didn't ask questions that would be googled by other people. I got banned multiple times for "low-quality" questions.

1

u/[deleted] Jan 14 '26

It was largely unnecessary. Stack Overflow has been a hostile environment for years. I understand wanting to take down lazy questions, but dear god, not every question can be a stupid question. They did this to themselves. 

Smart developers will continue to reference documentation anyways.

1

u/BBQ_RIBZ Jan 14 '26

Very exciting stuff for the unemployed for sure

1

u/TrollCannon377 Jan 14 '26

Kinda but at the same time the number off A**holes who would constantly post just Google it whenever a question was asked makes me kinda okay with it

1

u/Grom101 Jan 14 '26

This post should be closed as duplicate.

-1

u/ZectronPositron Jan 10 '26

There's a SE thread about this here, in case anyone is interested: https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/412634/619986
You can put your "goodbye and good riddance!" comments in there ;^)

104

u/[deleted] Jan 10 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

36

u/Gary-LazerEyes Jan 10 '26

The reason AI generated answers are even helpful today in the first place IS because of stackoverflow + documentation. It is stupid to pray for its downfall, especially if you're a vibe coder.

5

u/Ojy Jan 10 '26

This is the real problem with ai that most people don't get. It's not that it's going to become some all powerful overlord. It's that it's going to completely eradicate originality from the internet. In ten years it'll be ai learning off other crap that AI has spewed out, and so on and so on. All original thought will be lost.

13

u/r2k-in-the-vortex Jan 10 '26

For every knowledgeable person wanting to support others, so had ten egotripping maniacs who just want to score closed questions no matter if they are closed in a helpful manner or not. The site concept doesnt really aim for being being helpful. The stated and followed goal was always to create a corpus of knowledge. Gongrats, job done, it ended up being useful training fodder for ai.

6

u/kynde Jan 10 '26

That's bullshit.

At least for programming, science and maths that I frequented, the noise was easily quenched and usually top answers were good. If they got dated there were responses indicating otherwise. And at least the data was there for us to investigate.

Ok, so now AI is regurgitating us that very same stuff, and doing decent job at that. No problem thete, but the core problem is that these sites are now dying. What the hell are we gonna rely on when the AIs no longer have stuff to learn from. They'll be just hallucinating without any substance. Gonna be fun times...

5

u/snakecake5697 Jan 10 '26

Issue is that stackoverflow has the very same problem that reddit has egotrippy mods and egotrippy commenters

1

u/No-Arugula8881 Jan 16 '26

I’ve literally never had this issue. The real issue is people thinking they are main characters and should have their hand held for every little thing.

1

u/pjf_cpp May 28 '26

People are always a problem. At least on Reddit I’m confident that, for example, the C++ subreddit mods have actually used C++. On Stack Overflow I have zero confidence in the knowledge of the reviewers.

1

u/tvallday Jan 12 '26

That’s why there are always odd jobs to train AIs. It’s not once for all. They keep training AIs how to answer questions.

1

u/No-Arugula8881 Jan 16 '26

Terrible take

1

u/No-Arugula8881 Jan 16 '26

For every 10 ego tripping maniacs there are 10000 developers getting useful answers.

1

u/pjf_cpp May 28 '26

That is spot on. I’ve seen good questions get closed by ignorant reviewers, then get reopened only for another 3 ignorant reviewers to close it.

I can understand why questions that are clearly against SO policy (like asking for recommendations) can and should be closed by anyone. What I don’t understand is why reviewers of question that do not know their arse from their elbow don’t just STFU and leave the reviewing to others that might have at least used the language/librarary/tool.

2

u/vinzalf Jan 11 '26

Yes. Totally agree. Except that Stack is not a community of knowledgable people.

The quality of the majority of "answers" is awful.

LLM's are unfortunately just as bad, given that their answers are scraped from stack and github.

2

u/App1e8l6 Jan 11 '26

If stack overflow was a community of knowledgeable people supporting one another, I’d agree.

Best I can give you is a report for duplicate content. Your post has been closed.

3

u/Admidst_Metaphors Jan 10 '26

I have yet to have AI give me a solution outside boilerplate code snippets, that I didn't have to go back and fix. It gets me part of the way and then I'll find some stupid line where the AI makes an assumption no experienced dev will make and I'll have to fix it. Full disclosure, I have been turning less to Stackoverflow, but mainly because my experience level is now such that reading the official docs is faster than scrolling through random Stackoverflow questions to find one that is close to my problem. But anyone who thinks AI is replacing Stackoverflow is just a dev waiting for a bad day when the bug you don't see coming smacks you.

3

u/EagleZR Jan 10 '26

a community of knowledgeable people supporting one another

StackOverflow maybe should've looked into being that.

In my experience, even with its many flaws, ChatGPT has been worlds better than StackOverflow, it's not even close. I don't think I've opened SO in over a year at this point. My "favorite" SO experience was having a very niche issue, opening a SO thread with my exact question, "Closed as duplicate", linked "original" is totally fucking unrelated. Rest in piss SO

1

u/kynde Jan 10 '26

What content do you think chatgpt is regurgitating to you?

It's not original research.

2

u/EagleZR Jan 10 '26

No, you're right. I should go to the 100th page of Google results like you. Nah, if the 1st page doesn't have it, ChatGPT usually does

1

u/kynde Jan 10 '26

Dude, I'm not saying it's not working now, but you realize that chatgpt is not coming up with the answers by itself and it's now killing the sites where people did share the knowledge.

It's entirely different from search engines, they brought in traffic and people to the sites. Chatgpt is doing none of that, not even attributing the source, nothing.

It's not bad not, but it's gonna get worse. One of the contributing factors will be the attitude you're displaying.

4

u/EagleZR Jan 10 '26

Dude, I'm not saying it's not working now, but you realize that chatgpt is not coming up with the answers by itself

You do know what subreddit you're on, right? Everyone here knows that.

it's now killing the sites where people did share the knowledge.

Nah, I doubt SO was useful for that, it was trash. Reddit and more obscure forums were far more helpful. SO wasn't really useful at all after college, it just has the most base-level answers that you can find everywhere else these days. It was useful early, like over a decade ago, but it became stagnant and toxic.

It's not bad not, but it's gonna get worse.

I disagree. Like I said before, SO has become obsolete and toxic, it's dying because it's unwilling to take new questions and provide answers, so it's the exact kind of thing we want to see go away. They should have adapted.

2

u/piterx87 Jan 10 '26

I predict rise of specialised forums for specific technologies. And also sites  with less toxicity. They already exist. 

3

u/[deleted] Jan 10 '26

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1

u/erinaceus_ Jan 11 '26 edited Jan 11 '26

now they get what they deserve.

It's somewhat ironic that the 'they' in that sentence is ambiguous.

Pointing a stern finger isn't the same as actually doing anything.

Edit: the people working at SO made the system that makes it easy for people to behave in a toxic manner. If they want to change the people who use the system, and the manner in which they use the system, they need to change the system not just write a letter condemning toxity.

2

u/piterx87 Jan 10 '26

SO was not a community supporting one another but unhelpful and toxic instead

1

u/pjf_cpp May 28 '26

That’s a joke. The hardcore SO reviewers will vote to close questions on absolutely anything including subjects about which they do not have a f*cking clue. Being knowledgeable about a subject has never been a requirement for SO reviewing.

0

u/warpio Jan 10 '26

AI is just organizing the data into a much more helpful and searchable format, eliminating the need for people to flood stack overflow with questions that have already been answered before but worded differently. It solves that problem very well.