It’s not that developers are switching to AI tools it’s that stack overflow is awful and has been for a long time. The AI tools are simply providing a better alternative, which really demonstrates how awful stack overflow is because the AI tools are not that good.
Ironic, they’re being closed as duplicate.
Undoubtedly. But you agree that the crowdsourced knowledge base of existing answers is useful, no? That is what the islop searches and reproduces. It is more convenient than waiting for a rude answer. But I don’t think islop will give you a good answer if someone has not been bothered answer it before in SO.
islop is a convenience, but you should fear the day you lose the original and the only way to get that info is some opaque islop oracle
Most answers on SO are either from a doc page, are common patterns found in multiple books, or is mostly opinion-based. Most code AIs are significantly better at the first two without even being trained on SO (which I wouldn’t want anyway - SO really does suck nowadays)
Would you say the same about Wikipedia?
Honestly just funny to see. It makes perfect sense, based on how they made the site hostile to users.
I was contributing to SO in 2014-2017 when my job wanted our engineers to be more “visible” online.
I was in the top 3% and it made me realize how incredibly small the community was. I was probably answering like 5 questions a week. It wasn’t hard. For some perspective, I’m making like 4-5 posts on Lemmy A DAY.
What made me really pissed was how often a new person would give a really good answer, then some top 1% chucklefuck would literally take that answer, rewrite it, and then have it appear as the top answer. And that happened to me constantly. But again, I didn’t care since I’m just doing this to show my company I’m a “good lil engineer”.
I stopped participating because of how they treated new users. And around 2020(?), SO made a pledge to be not so douchy and actually allow new users to ask questions. But that 1% chucklefuck crew was still allowed to wave their dicks around and stomp on people’s answers. So yeah, less “Duplicate questions”, more “This has been answered already [link to their own answer that they stole]”.
So they removed the toxic attitude with asking questions, but not the toxicity when answering. SO still had the most sweaty people control responses, including editing/deleting them. And you can’t grow a community like that.
Reported for duplicate.
Already before the LLMs for me it was the last chance before I would post over there. The desperation move. It was too toxic and I would always get pissed to get my question closed because too similar or too easy or whatever. Hey I wasted 15 minutes to type that, if the other question solved the problem I wouldn’t post again…
In the beginning it wasn’t like that…
I went to watch my stack overflow account and the first questions that I posted (and that gave me 2000 karma) would have been almost all of them rejected and removed
The Redditification of SO
But what will the mods close for arbitrary reasons before there are any responses?
I’m sorry, but I’ve had to close your comment because it was too speculative.
Betelgeuse is in retrograde, so this post is closed. Bitch
“Search before asking!” - Stack Overflow
Stack Overflow lost its job to ai
To AI using Stack Overflow data.
It’s all already been used to train AI at this point.
Will the AI still flame me if I ask the wrong question?
Is nothing sacred anymore?
Real talk though, it is concerning when it feels like 3/5 times you ask AI something, you’ll get a completely hair brained answer back. SO will probably need to clamp down non-logged in browsing and enforce API limits to make sure that AI trainers are paying for the data they need.
Depends on the model, I think Opus 4.5 is the only model that I’ve prompted which is getting close to not just being a boring sycophant.
Who is going to ask there to be harresed
What? People would rather have their balls licked by AI rather than have some neckbeard moderator change the entire language of their question and not answer shit? Fuck SO. That shit was so ass to interact with.
Every question has been answered, pack it up boys.
Respect for StackOverflow not selling out to an AI training company despite being their biggest source of training. But their moderation still sucks.
TBH asking questions on SO (and most similar platforms) fucking sucks, no surprise that users jump at the first opportunity at getting answers another way.
Removed. Someone else already said this before. Also, please ensure you stick to the stlye guides next time, and be less ambiguous. SO could mean a plethora of things.
Spoiler
last time this question was answered was for several years older software versions, and the old solutions don’t work anymore. Whoops!
SO PTSD is real.
You have been banned for off topic low effort conversation.
Shivers…
I remember when I signed up for SO and was immediately put off by the fact you couldn’t post a conversation asking for help until you had helped others out AND gotten enough positive points.
I still did it, but damn their moderation system is ass.
Ah yes the famous: you need to add more details, may e a picture but you need to have above 100 reputation before you can add a picture or edit your question
Git gud, n00b!
In a video covering the toxicity of Stackoverflow, it was found ot at least some of the admins are also extremely toxic on other sites, in that same exact manner.
I was in the middle of making a reply like this but yours is better. Closed as duplicate.
I will never forget the time I posted a question about why something wasn’t working as I expected, with a minimal example (≈ 10 lines of python, no external libraries) and a description of the expected behaviour and observed behaviour.
The first three-ish replies I got were instant comments that this in fact does work like I would expect, and that the observed behaviour I described wasn’t what the code would produce. A day later, some highly-rated user made a friendly note that I had a typo that just happened to trigger this very unexpected error.
Basically, I was thrashed by the first replies, when the people replying hadn’t even run the code. It felt extremely good to be able to reply to them that they were asshats for saying that the code didn’t do what I said it did when they hadn’t even run it.
Damn, lol
Yea it sucks, but quality is important so I get it.
I do understand being rigorous about questions, and technical forums were even worse a lot of the time, but SO’s methods led to the site becoming severely outdated. They really should have introduced a mechanism to mark old content as outdated. It should have been obvious like 10 years ago that solutions often stop working come next major version or the programming language, framework or operating system.
According to a Stack Overflow survey from 2025, 84 percent of developers now use or plan to use AI tools, up from 76 percent a year earlier. This rapid adoption partly explains the decline in forum activity.
As someone who participated in the survey, I’d recommend everyone take anything regarding SO’s recent surveys with a truckfull of salt. The recent surveys have been unbelievably biased with tons of leading questions that force you to answer in specific ways. They’re basically completely worthless in terms of statistics.
Realistically though, asking an LLM what’s wrong with my code is a lot faster than scrolling through 50 posts and reading the ones that talk about something almost relevant.
It’s even faster to ask your own armpit what’s wrong with your code, but that alone doesn’t mean you’re getting a good answer from it
If you get a good answer just 20% of the time, an LLM is a smart first choice. Your armpit can’t do that. And my experience is that it’s much better than 20%. Though it really depends a lot of the code base you’re working on.
Also depends on your level of expertise. If you have beginner questions, an LLM should give you the correct answer most of the time. If you’re an expert, your questions have no answers. Usually, it’s something like an obscure firmware bug edge case even the manufacturer isn’t aware of. Good luck troubleshooting that without writing your own drivers and libraries.
If you’re writing cutting edge shit, then LLM is probably at best a rubber duck for talking things through. Then there are tons of programmers where the job is to translate business requirements into bog standard code over and over and over.
Nothing about my job is novel except the contortions demanded by the customer — and whatever the current trendy JS framework is to try to beat it into a real language. But I am reasonably good at what I do, having done it for thirty years.
Yeah the internet seems to think coding is an expert thing when 99.9% of coders do exactly what you described. I do it, you do it, everybody does it. Even the people claiming to do big boy coding, when you really look at the details, they’re mostly slapping bog standard code on business needs.
Boring standard coding is exactly where you can actually let the LLM write the code. Manual intervention and review is still required, but at least you can speed up the process.
Code made up of severally parts with inconsistently styles of coding and design is going to FUCK YOU UP in the middle and long terms unless you never again have to touch that code.
It’s only faster if you’re doing small enough projects that an LLM can generate the whole thing in one go (so, almost certainly, not working as professional at a level beyond junior) and it’s something you will never have to maintain (i.e. prototyping).
Using an LLM is like giving the work to a large group of junior developers were each time you give them work it’s a random one that picks up the task and you can’t actually teach them: even when it works, what you get is riddled with bad practices and design errors that are not even consistently the same between tasks so when you piece the software together it’s from the very start the kind of spaghetti mess you see in a project with lots of years in production which has been maintained by lots of different people who didn’t even try to follow each others coding style plus since you can’t teach them stuff like coding standards or design for extendability, it will always be just as fucked up as day one.
Yeah but in that edge case SO wouldn’t help either even before the current crash. Unless you were lucky. I find LLM useful to push me in the right direction when I’m stuck and documentation isn’t helping either not necessarily to give me perfectly written code. It’s like pair programming with someone who isn’t a coder but somehow has read all the documentation and programming books. Sometimes the left field suggestions it makes are quite helpful.
I’ve found some interesting and even good new functions by moaning my code woes to an LLM. Also, it has taken me on some pointless wild goose chases too, so you better watch out. Any suggestion has the potential to be anywhere from absolutely brilliant to a completely stupid waste of time.
How do you know it’s a good answer? That requires prior knowledge that you might have. My juniors repeatedly demonstrate they’ve no ability to tell whether an LLM solution is a good one or not. It’s like copying from SO without reading the comments, which they quickly learn not to do because it doesn’t pass code review.
That’s exactly the question, right? LLMs aren’t a free skill up. They let you operate at your current level or maybe slightly above, but they let you iterate very quickly.
If you don’t know how to write good code then how can you know if the AI nailed it, if you need to tweak the prompt and try over, or if you just need to fix a couple of things by hand?
(Below is just skippable anecdotes)
Couple of years ago, one of my junior devs submitted code to fix a security problem that frankly neither of us understood well. New team, new code base. The code was well structured and well written but there were some curious artifacts, like there was a specific value being hard-coded to a DTO and it didn’t make sense to me that doing that was in any way security related.
So I quizzed him on it, and he quizzed the AI (we were remote so…) and insisted that this was correct. And when I asked for an explanation of why, it was just Gemini explaining that its hallucination was correct.
In the meanwhile, I looked into the issue, figured out that not only was the value incorrectly hardcoded into a model, but the fix didn’t work either, and I figured out a proper fix.
This was, by the way, on a government contract which required a public trust clearance to access the code — which he’d pasted into an unauthorized LLM.
So I let him know the AI was wrong, gave some hints as to what a solution would be, and told him he’d broken the law and I wouldn’t say anything but not to do that again. And so far as I could tell, he didn’t, because after that he continued to submit nothing weirder than standard junior level code.
But he would’ve merged that. Frankly, the incuriousity about the code he’d been handed was concerning. You don’t just accept code from a junior or LLM that you don’t thoroughly understand. You have to reason about it and figure out what makes it a good solution.
Shit, a couple of years before that, before any LLMs I had a brilliant developer (smarter than me, at least) push a code change through while I was out on vacation. It was a three way dependency loop like A > B > C > A and it was challenging to reason about and frequently it was changing to even get running. Spring would sometimes fail to start because the requisite class couldn’t be constructed.
He was the only one on the team who understood how the code worked, and he had to fix that shit every time tests broke or any time we had to interact with the delicate ballet of interdependencies. I would never have let that code go through, but once it was in and working it was difficult to roll back and break the thing that was working.
Two months later I replaced the code and refactored every damn dependency. It was probably a dozen classes not counting unit tests — but they were by far the worst because of how everything was structured and needed to be structured. He was miserable the entire time. Lesson learned.
This is the big issue. LLMs are useful to me (to some degree) because I can tell when its answer is probably on the right track, and when it’s bullshit. And still I’ve occasionally wasted time following it in the wrong direction. People with less experience or more trust in LLMs are much more likely to fall into that trap.
LLMs offer benefits and risks. You need to learn how to use it.
Also depends on how you phrase the question to the LLM, and whether it har access to source files.
A web chat session can’t do a lot, but an interactive shell like Claude Code is amazing - if you know how to work it.
My armpits refuse to talk to me. I’ll take that as a sign that overflow errors are a feature, not bug.
I post there every 6-12 months in the hope of receiving some help or intelligent feedback, but usually just have my question locked or removed. The platform is an utter joke and has been for years. AI was not entirely the reason for its downfall imo.
Not common I’m sure, but I once had an answer I posted completely rewritten for grammar, punctuation, and capitalization. I felt so valued. /s
The last time I asked a question, I followed the formatting of a recent popular question/post. Someone did not like that and decided to implement their formatting, thebvproceeded to dramatically change my posts and updates. Also people kept giving me solutions to problems I never included in my question. The whole thing was ridiculous.
As a mod, this is all I ever did on the platform. Thanks for the appreciation!
haha I ran into this too, someone changed the title of my question on one of their non-programming boards - I was so pissed, I never went back to that particular board (it was especially annoying because it was a quite personal question)
I used to post had the same thing. Then people would insult me for not knowing like “why you think I’m asking?”
