People are so mean there. I've seen those who say they love Stack Overflow, but to me, it always feels like I ask a real question that has been haunting me for a long time. At times, I reach the point where I think, "to hell with it," and I ask on SO. For example, I once asked a very specific question about how to manually layout text in GTK, and people responded as if they were noob questions (which honestly they were not). They bully you for not having searched the web, even though you did search and found nothing. This bullying makes you feel dumb, and then most of the time, they just give you a look and walk away without helping you.
For me, it has always been about searching Google. If it led to SO, I would check the solutions, but most of the time, they didn't work. There would always be a blog somewhere with someone nice enough to put in the effort and explain things in detail. Once I got used to this, LLMs emerged, which are so much better. They provide solutions and combinations that make wild things easy, even those without documentation. And they do so instantly and pleasantly. No LLM bullies you for not having searched the web and then walks away.
I'm kind of glad that SO is fading; there's a lot of bullying that is running into oblivion.
Once critical mass of programmers relies on LLMs, original code creation and usage will decline, as LLMs will not provide these as suggestions. So entering the “dark ages of programming” will solve for that, as you won’t need to retrain LLMs.
RAG + documentation might help. I wonder if documentation will start to take a more standardized format across projects that's especially easy for LLMs to parse (maybe everything dumped into a single .txt file?). I'm currently learning Polars, and it's frustrating how LLMs keep giving me deprecated code. But if they load the current documentation, they should be able to catch their mistakes.
People who crave karma points will continue do so. The game isn't for the faint hearted. SO still has the best gamification model and there isn't any competitor.
Does it, really? I have a few thousand points over there but I just gathered them from my work related issue solving. I never dedicated time just to solve SO questions and I doubt the people who do are plentiful enough to keep the website going. Most answers I see are posted by accounts with less than 10k reputation which really isn't hard to get. I doubt the "grinders" will keep the website alive if everyone else will move to LLMs.
Some SO users just run around downvoting everything, and of course the cowards leave no comments.
If you dare bring this up in the SO forum, perhaps suggesting or asking about a way to mitigate this behavior, pedantic douchebags go apoplectic with "Oh THIS again" as if the problem were solved.
For me, it has always been about searching Google. If it led to SO, I would check the solutions, but most of the time, they didn't work. There would always be a blog somewhere with someone nice enough to put in the effort and explain things in detail. Once I got used to this, LLMs emerged, which are so much better. They provide solutions and combinations that make wild things easy, even those without documentation. And they do so instantly and pleasantly. No LLM bullies you for not having searched the web and then walks away. I'm kind of glad that SO is fading; there's a lot of bullying that is running into oblivion.