“One problem with modern LLM systems is that they will provide incorrect answers with the same confidence as correct ones, and will ‘hallucinate’ facts and figures if they feel it fits the pattern of the answer a user seeks,” he states. Perhaps as one might expect, Chandrasekar highlights limitations of AI coding. In a separate post Chandrasekar writes, “we’ve got a dedicated team working on adding GenAI to Stack Overflow and Stack Overflow for Teams”, the latter being a private, paid-for version of the site. Last week he posted a blog about a 10% or 58 employee reduction in the workforce, and made an undertaking to launch “AI/ML focused offerings” in the coming months. The same will not be the case for more niche questions, many of which may not be answered at all.Ĭhandrasekar has now publicly acknowledged that AI coding poses a challenge for Stack Overflow. The counter point is that a developer might copy and paste code from Stack Overflow without understanding it either – though the crowdsourcing effect means that popular code snippets get a lot of eyes inspecting them for quality. You may have to debug it and have no idea what was just built, and it’s hard to skip the learning journey by taking shortcuts,” he told us. “At some point you’re going to need to know what you’re building. That said, it does seem notable that today the site is reporting 5.6m visitors per day and 3.5k questions per day, whereas in June last year that was 7.4m visitors and 5.5k questions.ĭevClass addressed this exact question with Stack Overflow CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar in November last year, when he made the point that developers need to understand the code they are writing. Stack Overflow publishes its own traffic statistics and analysis of these in conjunction with Web Archive does not altogether match up with the SimilarWeb stats. Website traffic fluctuates for many reasons, not least constant changes in search engine algorithms, and it is hard to match up exactly how increased use of AI coding corresponds to declining use of Stack Overflow. CodeWhisperer was first previewed in June 2022, and Google introduced code generation with Bard last month. OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which shares some technology with Copilot, can also write code on request. Pop-up help in editors like Visual Studio Code is another way of getting this kind of assistance, and the quality and scope of this coding help has greatly increased in the last couple of years, thanks to use of AI and the arrival of services such as Copilot, AWS CodeWhisperer, and most recently, Google Bard.Ĭopilot first entered public preview in June 2021 and was generally available from June 2022. Stack Overflow, a programmers’ question and answer site, has long been among the first stops for countless developers when stuck on a coding issue or forgetting the right syntax or arguments for a common task. Traffic to programmer help site Stack Overflow has been dropping “by an average of 6% every month since January 2022, and was down 13.9% in March,” according to stats from web traffic analysis company SimilarWeb, a likely reason being increased use of AI coding assistants such as GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT.
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