The Fall of Stack Overflow

https://programming.dev/post/931727

The Fall of Stack Overflow - programming.dev

Stack Overflow has seen a substantial decline in traffic over the last year that appears to be accelerating.

I bet this is directly related to ChatGPT
People prefer having something generating shitty code and not checking it, instead of asking or searching on internet for a substantially better solution

Because forum posts are always full of accurate and helpful information?

In my experience it still makes good suggestions for most things, and is better than trying to phrase things in a way that Google likes, then trawling through irrelevant forum posts.

It’s only there to make suggestions, so if someone is taking its output without understanding and treating it like gospel then they’re an idiot who’s inevitably going to end up in a world of trouble.

If you take the suggestion, verify it with documentation, then make sure you actually understand it, chatGPT is a great tool.

I didn’t say that people should go on the internet and pick the first forum post either ; that would be like trusting whatever chatgpt is handing you :p

My point was more on the “people are lazy” side of things, but yeah you have to stay critical of both chatgpt and forum posts.

I agree, I just think that those lazy people will do what they do regardless of where they get their info.

To butcher a saying; blame the craftsman, not the tools.

I half expect that, if enough programmers use ChatGPT-written code verbatim, someday it’s going to lead to Skynet. I mean, what’s to stop ChatGPT from inserting bits of extra code to be used for its own distributed processing botnet?
A lack of intelligence and awareness?
You’ve never written code, have you?