can life exist without stackoverflow?

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mnelemos@reddit

Before AI I did use stack overflow quite frequently, but honestly, after AI, never touched it again.

I even remember in the very beginning stack overflow outright calling out AI, because it was scraping their website, and they did even a full on blog post saying they would never dwell in AI. But then a few months later, they bent over for ai, even doing their "overflowai" thing, which just goes to show that their traffic must've tanked really bad.

But yeah, I would say life can easily exist without stack overflow, specially when you have other places to look for resources, and you also have AI which is just a big help on search.

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Any_Sense_2263@reddit (OP)

Problems I'm solving on a daily basis are unsolvable by AI. I tried free and paid services, and they suck 😀

And AI is rarely updated, and I work on the newest versions of frameworks and libraries... so configuration and use cases differ from what AI can serve 😀

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mnelemos@reddit

I mean, stack overflow isn't necessarily "updated" either, most answered questions are from decades ago.

No one is saying you should use AI to generate your code, but it's pretty decent at summarizing documentation and doing searches for you. Obviously, I still don't trust 100% AI search, specially when I am doing a technical documentation which will be seen by others, but it is way easier asking AI to do a search, then a summary, and then ask it to give me all of its sources and confirming them by myself. It's still a fight between when I want something handed to me fast but not very precise, or something small but very precise, I change between AI search and google search very frequently.

But to be completely fair with you, if you work with the "newest versions of frameworks and libraries", odds are that you work in the "application" layer, which is the data that AI has been trained the most. While my job usually includes looking at standards defined 10+ years ago.

I do believe & hope there will be a point where AI just summarizes everything for me, and I can blindly follow it, kinda a "fool's POV", but still something every programmer desires since their birth, even if they tell you that they don't want that.

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angrynoah@reddit

Some of us are old enough to remember when it didn't exist.

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Any_Sense_2263@reddit (OP)

I do... I also remember pre google time, but I appreciate their existence 😀

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Rinuko@reddit

For a moment I thought you meant the website

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GauntletOfMight1425@reddit

Much like google, SO is polluted these days. Its value isn't what it once was. What used to be daily use is no more than occasional.

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zeocrash@reddit

I remember years go when my office internet connection went down and no one could do any work as there was no access to google or stack overflow

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Any_Sense_2263@reddit (OP)

yeah... I experienced the same :D and in 2001 or 2002 when alta vista (no one heard about google yet) was down :D

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UtahJarhead@reddit

Not to be confused with astalavista.

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csabinho@reddit

You might mean 1999. In 2001 or 2002 Google was quite big already.

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Any_Sense_2263@reddit (OP)

depends on where... I don't live in the States :D

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csabinho@reddit

Me neither.

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zeocrash@reddit

aaah altavista that takes me back

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userhwon@reddit

The result of nobody documenting anything.

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zeocrash@reddit

Lots of people documented things... on stack overflow.

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romple@reddit

Honestly so many SO answers that are top google results are old. That's not necessarily bad but when you have a problem with React and all the answers you find are about React version 15 it can be a little unhelpful. Or maybe you end up doing something the C11 way when there are better ways to do it using something released in C17.

At some point you'll stop relying on SO answers and learn to get most of the information you need from official docs if they exist. You'll never stop looking things up, but the more you rely on official sources that hopefully 1) exist and 2) are up to date the better off you'll be.

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iOSCaleb@reddit

Don’t search SO via Google — go to the site itself so that you can sort answers by date, relevance, etc. Likewise, if you’re using an LLM that was trained on data from 2023, you’re going to miss a lot of newer info.

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Any_Sense_2263@reddit (OP)

I usually read or at least check all answers and comments... many times, I found useful hint hidden there 😀

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SaltAssault@reddit

Can life exist without bad questions?

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Boh-meme-ia@reddit

I mean there are other forums. I know SO is huge, but like, there are other options.

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Any_Sense_2263@reddit (OP)

There are, but needed answers I mostly find on SO and sometimes on github or gist... so other forums don't have the answers I need or aren't indexed by google...

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EmperorLlamaLegs@reddit

No, I'm afraid it can not. That's why when they are looking for signs of life on other planets they look for evidence of water, along with biomarkers like stackoverflow, methane, free oxygen, etc.

I hate to break it to you, but If they don't get their servers straightened out, we may be looking at an extinction event worse than the K-T event.

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EmperorLlamaLegs@reddit

Seriously though, AI has scraped a lot of stackoverflow content. If you're looking for general advice AI isn't a bad route to take. Just don't ask it to actually write code for you. Between its advice (reworded stackoverflow advice, usually) and language/library docs, you should be fine.

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Any_Sense_2263@reddit (OP)

until now, AI (including cursor and paid chatGPT) couldn't solve my problems :D

after spending hours observing how this "intelligence" circles and repeats the same mistakes, I would rather solve my problems by looking for the experience of others and documentation :D it take less time and effects are much better :D

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EmperorLlamaLegs@reddit

Where I tend to use AI is after I identify a broad problem, abstract the big problem down into little discreet actionable pieces, and I want to see if there is a preferred algorithm to handle one of the challenges of a little piece.

You've always got to do the heavy lifting as a programmer, but "what is the most efficient method to process x data structure" is a reasonable question for AI.

As an example, it's usually enough to get you from "I want to procedurally generate a voxel terrain" to a point where you are reading about marching cubes and vertex order for mesh normals.

I'm not sure what your specific problem is though, it may be niche enough that you might need to find advice directly from one of those living code-monkey humans I keep hearing so much about.

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Any_Sense_2263@reddit (OP)

Fresh installation of nextjs plus added cypress. Problem? Create merged test coverage from cypress e2e tests and jest unit tests. I worked on cursor, so AI had access to the full codebase.

after 16 hours of making 3 circles and repeating the same not working solutions I just googled it, found a repo with a solution, and applied it to my setup with some alignments needed because of changes in the libraries. Just configuration. 2hrs of work in total

AI has no access to the internet in the real time. And if has... it can't use it. It used proper solutions but for older versions of libraries. It couldn't work.

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winauer@reddit

Stackoverflow was created in 2008, so life did in fact exist without stackoverflow for 38 years.

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Any_Sense_2263@reddit (OP)

yes, it finally does!

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