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I was speaking with a senior dev at AWS earlier today about AI and coding. Amazon has its own tools for both devs and corp staff and doesn't allow outside tools for anything but simple questions who's output will never be in a work product. He said that one of the bigger surprises for him was how many devs, especially the more junior ones, have adopted using AI for a lot of their coding questions and drastically reduced or stopped using the popular developer forums like StackOverflow for research. He asked a few of them what the main appeal of asking the AI was and they said, even though the AI is often wrong and you have to double check all its answers, it never insults you for knowing less than it does or mocks you for trying to learn something, which was an extrememly common experience on the forums. My own work involves some AI interaction intent-verification where my teams review AI-human interactions for new products to judge how well it captures the person's intentions and the quality of responses. From my POV one of the best things about these AI bot tools it they can't (deliberately) lie, automatically making them better than I'd estimate 75% of the people they will likely replace, who lie constantly.
Yeah it's great for that. You can ask really detailed specific questions, supply lots of context and then ask follow up questions, in real time. Whereas on a forum you're waiting and waiting...
https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/07/10/welcome-wagon-classifying-comments-on-stack-overflow/
To be fair, most humans answering questions on stack overflow are unpaid volunteers. (Sure, a few are Godharding their own score for professional reasons, but the most efficient way of doing this is to plagiarize answers from other people to similar questions.)
Giving advice to people who are advise-resistant can be very frustrating even when you are getting paid for it. Sometimes it emerges that the advice-seeker is planning to do the equivalent of adding helium balloons to a tank to build an air superiority platform, and after a lengthy discussion your only impact is that he is now planning to use hydrogen instead to counter your argument about helium prices.
For me, 99% of the value of stack overflow is that a google search redirects me to a question someone has asked years ago. While it sometimes happen that I try to communicate on IRC, github, SO or the like with random strangers to solve a problem I am having, that is basically an admission of defeat, and I tend not to surrender easily.
The tone on SO should reflect that >90% of the value provided by the site is to passive readers. If you ask a new, interesting, relevant question that is providing a tremendous service to the readers, same as answering such a question. If you are asking a question which was already answered five times because you did not bother to google first, you are wasting everyone's time. If your code or design is shit, then anyone pointing that out is providing a valuable service to the community, given that the question will mainly be read by people with a similar knowledge level.
With IRC (or discord?), this calculation is different, because IRC logs are typically not google-indexed. (Or at least I can not remember finding the answer to a technical question in an IRC log not explicitly generated by a human, ever.) There is not really an audience who is the main beneficiary of the interaction.
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The thing about stackoverflow is most of the time I'm doing a web search and that brings me to a Stackoverflow link. I check the link and it's not the same question I have, it's something superficially similar. That's the same thing AI tends to do, so it's a wash anyway.
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