Tough times for traditional intelligence. I know it’s undeniable if you just look around, but here our comparison is with artificial intelligence.
“Developers? Developers are weak. The Blood of Numenor is nearly spent, its pride and dignity forgotten. It’s thanks to the devs that the Ring survives. I was there, Gandalf. I was there three thousand years ago. I was there on the day the strength of the developers failed.”
An article with a Tolkien quote is denied to no one: Once the ring, or, if you prefer, generative AI, is found, why should a programmer give up the immense power it brings by going back to writing code, perhaps struggling to understand what a function does, or even going back to read that **** manual.
As I said, I was there three thousand years ago, though in computer years, it seems much more. I was programming in a time when the only resources were books, tomes of 500 or more pages that, despite being a freelancer, forced me to go to the office to consult them, being a digital nomad at the time would have meant buying a caravan with a trailer :-).
Then came the first forums, the first guides, those who used search engines better (Google was still one of many) could walk past the secretary’s desk feeling much taller. To write this article, I checked again, and some historical names have become something else or disappeared, following the technologies that have transformed or even become extinct. Esteemed people tell me that, if you dig deep, you can still find suggestions on how to call the Windows XP APIs from ASP through IIS.
Natural evolution led to specialized portals that gave me different feelings depending on the companies I worked for and the projects I was assigned, all generated conflicting feelings except one: Expert Exchange. Expert Exchange always made me feel poor.
There was a solution to almost anything; it let you read the first lines, which were usually full of the joy of those who had solved their problem, but then, if you weren’t subscribed, it blacked everything out. Those were years when asking your boss to pay for something like that was technically impossible, since credit cards were still for the few, and the most you could hope for in terms of training resources were pirate MSDN disks released 12 months prior.
Fortunately, however, Stack Overflow gradually emerged as the quintessential “lifebuoy” site. But calling it a site is a bit simplistic since there’s a very interesting company behind it. Officially, it was founded in 2008 by Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky. The idea for Stack Overflow came from both founders’ frustration with the difficulties of getting quick and effective answers to technical questions online.
Before Stack Overflow, online forums were often disorganized, poorly moderated, and hard to navigate. Often, answers to technical questions were scattered across numerous threads and not always reliable or weighed, making mistakes democratic and frustrating.
Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky envisioned Stack Overflow as a question-and-answer platform based on gamification principles and community moderation. The idea was to present suggested answers but also to have a self-sustaining endorsement system.
From the start, it attracted a growing user base thanks to its intuitive interface, the organized structure of questions and answers, and the effective community moderation system.
Looking back, things could only go in that direction with two founders of this caliber. Joel Spolsky, in particular, has always been a leading figure in the software world. Before Stack Overflow, he had an epic career in software development. He worked as a programmer at Microsoft, contributing to the development of products like Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Visual Basic, and later founded his software company, Fog Creek Software, which produced several successful applications, including Trello, an app that became a must when it comes to Agile methodologies and which I use even for shopping.
But beyond his entrepreneurial activity, Joel Spolsky is also known as the author of several books and for his blog “Joel on Software,” where he shared essays and reflections on software engineering, project management, and other related topics. In this book, he expresses a delivery inclination that would make a school in the years to come. His comparison between writing code and military training remains one of the most brilliant examples to describe the concept of effectiveness.
To this day, Stack Overflow remains the most effective tool, the main reference point for developers worldwide seeking answers to their technical questions. The platform offers a wide range of topics, from programming languages to web technologies, and hosts millions of questions and answers generated by the users themselves. In 2021, it received investments and grew to become a strategic asset worth some sacrifices.
Its acquisition by Prosus, the Dutch multinational known for acquiring the Chinese company Tencent, allowed the integration of Stack Overflow into its network of companies and platforms in the education and technology sector, offering a more complete and diversified range of services.
The exact figures have not been made public, but the industry press agreed that the deal was around two billion dollars, given the opportunity to leverage the vast user base and extensive technical expertise to further develop and improve its products and services.
In addition to being a vast source of knowledge for programmers and software developers of every experience level with millions of questions and answers on a wide range of topics, Stack Overflow is supported by an active community of programmers who contribute with questions, answers, and comments. This constant exchange of knowledge promotes the growth and professional development of developers.
Beyond technical questions and answers, it offers resources for professional development, such as career advice, programming best practices, and guidance on new technologies. Many companies also use it to recruit talent in the technology sector, as they can evaluate the skills and experience of potential candidates by viewing their questions, answers, and contributions.
It could have been a very convenient deal given all these activities and the user base.
However, returning to the present day, with AI Tools like Devin allowing even the creation of DevOps pipelines, does it still make sense to turn to Stack Overflow? Should we change all the try-catch constructs that went directly to search for errors on our site? Does the incredible drop in unique visitors trace an inexorable path?
https://observablehq.com/@ayhanfuat/the-fall-of-stack-overflow
In my opinion, no!
It’s undeniable that generative AIs are currently seen as the tool that solves the world’s problems.
It’s hard to compete with them by proposing now-obsolete paradigms like a traditional search engine unless your business is based on the fact that a token on an AI burns the equivalent of a centuries-old oak. As the proverb goes, if you can’t beat them, join them: our friends have certainly not stood by idly, creating their OverflowAI, a generative AI made specifically to help devs solve their problems.
Here is an introductory video:
So far, it would be a matter of choosing for sympathy or convenience, considering that ChatGPT (and all its little brothers) cannot use data on Stack Overflow, except for a fee, and often the training methodology does not take into account the votes given to answers.
Therefore, it is likely that OverflowAI will be our preferred choice for writing particularly complex code where ChatGPT’s responses will be incomplete or cumbersome, or we might use it in conjunction with other AIs that have other strengths, balancing their results.
The fact remains that both the API ecosystem, the partnership with Google, and finally the possibility of having access to exclusive databases make OverflowAI among the most interesting tools for the Dev world.
And this until the next generative AI allows reading specifications directly from the client’s mind by conducting a Rorschach test…
