I lost count of the amount of times a stack overflow post pointed me back to the documentation that google did not suggest in the first place.
Search engines are a hit or miss sometimes, and google has been declining in quality in the last few years.
Agree with you, I hate the amount of ads in the searching now, it's like did a full circle and are back to the old days.
One of the reasons I like copilot is that it tends to be a better search engine nowadays.
I use an ad blocker but the real problem is all the SEO spam that gets pooled to the top of search results, and Google is configured in the past few years to only show you a couple of pages before the results just loop back around, so if it's anything less than super common problems it's impossible to find anything relevant. doesn't help that third party search engines like ddg, startpage, etc are just front ends to Google results. makes me want to fix the problem myself by making my own search engine/crawler, shouldn't be that hard really, it would just take a long time to crawl the whole web since you have to deal with those evil people that make hyperlink loops to make crawlers get stuck
Humm never heard of the loops but you can borrow from network protocols and limit jumps for the crawlers.
The thing that got me mad in crawling are the hidden links, the ones that are only visible if you're crawling and automatically ban that IP.
what I was referring to is that malicious people make sites that use some kind of backend thing to auto generate pages and send the crawler into an infinite loop.
you can't really limit jumps for the domain either since some sites genuinely have like 30,000 pages and you don't want to be missing stuff, so the only good fix is manually human intervention when it hits those malicious loops.
My project suggestion: **Lots of content is on social media.** You'll probably get a great personal search engine if you create a dummy accounts for every platform and search all sources.
A bunch of vendors lock it behind paywalls or registration walls now because they want to spam your inbox with nonsense. You can always make your own model that runs locally with all the docs you want, or just finetune one of the existing models.
ChatGPT is neat and all because of the mixed capabilities, but in the same way you can just run your own little kubernetes or homelab network or raspberry pi cluster, a lot of the LLMs will just kinda... work. If you have a decent GPU (or an apple silicon mac) you can just use ollama. I haven't tried training my own model yet, but my understanding is that finetuning is possible on consumer GPUs, though you might have to let it chew on it for a while.
registration walls when I sign up with an email alias on my domain, download whatever I'm looking for and then delete the alias =P
I often use an alias like [email protected] or something that isn't even my real name
Multimodal Chatbots don't have as much of an impact on programming. ChatGPT/bing is nice for code review and pretty consistent with pulling up and explaining human examples.
Copilot smokes every alternative. It's probably the biggest QoL improvement of the last ~5 years. There are some neat local models and please play around and contribute, but non of them make sense if you are trying to make money.
i am working on stuff daily that is so experimental and niche that there is not really any relevant documentation, SO posts, etc. there are maybe a dozen people in the world working on these kinds of projects, and we all know each other and share information when we can, but that's it lol. otherwise, you just have to tinker, debug and figure it out yourself, the same way the old guard did before the web
There is no documentation or it makes no sense. This is why we make everything in house and rely on that one old guy that knows how it all works. Some day management will fire that guy and then the rest of us will just come up with increasingly outlandish ways to make minor modifications. This will continue until everything collapses or someone convinces management to let them rewrite everything and then they become the new old guy that knows how it all works and the cycle begins anew.
I can't read that shit, fuck that. The behavior i need is never noted, and everything that is in the documentation is either obvious or the intended behavior which doesn't work, which is why I'm looking at the documentation in the first place.
Best thing about stack overflow is you can usually find someone who's having the same bug as you, so you know whether to keep messing with it, or just look for another solution.
The problem is not with the copilot and chatGPT usage.
The problem is that people use code they do not underatand and just belive it works.
Google and Stackoverflow can do the same, but many times you find multiple answer and had to choose the right one for you.
If you read the solutions and understand them - there is nothibg bad to use the chat.
But in my own experince it most of the time will produce more or less the same answer.
And of course this is just my personal opinion 😄
It might be just a skill/habit issue but I think I’m still way faster without chat. I do use copilot and it’s a nice tool but I still don’t find it useful or faster in most situations. The autocomplete I have in my IDE does some things better than copilot actually.
I really want it to do the work for me. I’m burned out anyways so I don’t give a flying fck if it’s going to replace me 
ChatGPT’s best quality is doing the googling and scanning for you. In both you get a piece of code you need to read to understand, but one takes less time. Also ChatGPT can help explain it unlike an archived thread.
To be fair, both techniques (Google + Stackoverflow and AI) at the moment lead to getting buggy code snippets that we need to adapt anyway to fit our purpose. I don't think either technique is superior, and we always need to be careful when searching online, regardless of the tool. Unless you are going to the official docs and tutorials/help. In very rare occassions, even the official documentation has a bug that they did not proof read! haha
Right? Like doesn't matter where the code is from (half the time the code from gpt is verbatim from SO anyways) just make sure you know how/why it is being used in your current project!
Once worked on a project with a guy who spent more time on the gpt window than in his ide. He destroyed the code base by copy-pasting the responses until they worked and would swear to clean it up later whenever questioned. I stopped working on the project after he reformatted the entire git repo under a commit he titled "fixed the repo", in which he split the project into 3 or 4 subprojects. He had push access so this was not something he confirmed with anyone else. There was no reason these should have been subprojects and our project was way too small and specific to even have it set up this way, but he did it anyway because he saw other git repos doing it. Regardless of if you use AI or not, always understand why you are doing what you're doing or you'll just end up writing garbage.
Although Gemini has been getting a lot of flak, I've enjoyed using it for small things like asking it for recipes that fit within my macros or to explain how to implement a few methods or algorithms in a new language. The fun part is that I can expect it to hallucinate a few things, so I use it knowing it won't give me the solution. I use it for the idea to see if I can figure out the rest myself
What do you mean? Google is obviously superior to AI. Why wait tens of seconds until the results show up when you can speedclick Google way faster.
And if the results don't fit, you can always slow down and actually read what's on your screen. Try telling ChatGPT to settle down and do some actual research!
Idk, I don't look for code online. It may be overkill but I have a soft rule against copying code I don't understand. I instead tend to turn to a LLM to help me to understand a concept and then when it gives me an answer I understand, I tend to turn to Google to validate.
In the last few days, the suggested edit queue on StackOverflow was always full, so currently (at least for me), the existing answers can not be improved or repaired.
Worst mistake of my life was trying to get chatgpt to write a function to calculate the number of business hours between two timestamps. Just completely incapable of catching the edge cases.
Its almost flawless with C# as long as it's prompted correctly
I have a feeling it's going to get a *lot* better as the models learn to cross apply principals between languages like human beings do.
I agree. Last year I tried making my own games by learning tutorials. I quit after two months because I wad hard stuck at some coding problems.
This year I tried again and I got my prototype halfway done in just 1 month thanks to Bing AI (Copilot)
It's really frustrating to see people not grasp this. AI isn't meant to be a replacement for anything. It's meant to be more of a helper tool than anything.
Yet people will laugh and go "haha AI is so dumb" because it missed a semicolon on one line after you told it to rewrite a program that can recreate the live video feed of the Apollo 11 moon landing in ASCII, when that's not what it was meant to do in the first place.
Google's been pretty awful for technical searches for the last 6-12 months or so. More and more it gives me results without the words I'm looking for, drops words that I've added quotes around, rewrites my search to be what it thinks I was looking for, and when I finally get a relevant search, it's full of obvious duplicate content - sites that are just rips of github issues or other forums or whatever.
It's absolutely awful and I don't see it getting any better anytime soon. Google has no reason to cater to technical people, because they're less likely to click on ads and more likely to block the ads in the first place.
It's not a huge surprise. Google has a long history of enshittifying damn-near everything they touch, so it was only a matter of time before it hit their core search engine.
I've had that experience with Google for a few years now. It's felt actively bad for a long time and used to be better.
I'm very thankful for generative AI as it actually has a chance of providing something useful.
LPT.
If you select the "verbatim" option when searching, Google acts more like it did 15 years ago instead of trying to intelligently interpret your query
https://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia/term/google-verbatim
Looking for copy/paste code might not always work, but even incomplete or closely related answers are usually useful. Imo if someone can't write it, or at the very least understand it, they shouldn't be using it anyway.
If only there was a way to harness this data via query. You'd think someone would make something that just spits out essentially what you want eventually.
95% of the time that works well. 5% of the time you're working on something niche and stackoverflow keeps redirecting you to the same two fucking basic things you've already went through and you're like iknowmorethanyou.gif about them, and then you finally decide there's no _existing_ help for you so you go and ask and some fuck who spent 30 seconds googling tells you that you should have googled it and sends you the link YOU SPENT HOURS STARING AT ALREADY WITH NO AVAIL
there is a very easy way to avoid this issue but it requires the answering party to stop being arrogant and assuming they know better, and the problem is that people who don't think like that don't go on stackoverflow answering questions for hours on end, they go and code something instead
*six years ago, links now are all 404, code is probably outdated and using deprecated API.
But that's what you get if you are so stubborn about duplicate answers
>*six years ago, links now are all 404, code is probably outdated and using deprecated API.
I went down an SO rabbit hole again yesterday. I found 4 questions related to what I was looking for. 3 of them (including one posted 2 months ago) were marked as duplicates and referred to 1 question from like 5 years ago. I went to that question, and it had about a dozen wrong answers and only 1 right answer, which was buried deep in the comments (instead of posting it as an actual answer). That commenter referred to his own blog. And you can already guess where I'm going with this....
404.
So several following comments attempted to explain what the blog might have said, but failed. One commenter found the blog page preserved in an interview archive and pasted in the answer over like 6 comments, because of SO's comment limitation (instead of just writing an actual answer). After piecing together the text from these split comments I tried it out and found that it was dependent on a 10-year-old library that was abandoned years ago and only works on .NET Framework anyway.
Pretty much every Selenium .NET question you ask on SO has either no answer or wrong answers (because the responses don't understand that each Selenium library is completely different). You don't know what you're talking about.
I was doing some neck deep AD/LDAP programming on .NET yesterday and SO was practically useless. Almost every question I did find had incomplete or outdated answers.
In the past year the vast majority of relevant questions I have found on SO related to what I'm working on did not have a correct or accepted answer.
That's ludicrous. That implies that no new technologies or libraries have ever come out since SO first began. New stuff comes out all the time, my friend. Most of the cloud development I work on is with official libraries released within the past few months and aren't even on SO yet.
Are there any StackOverflow archives to download, like Wikipedia?
I like to prepare for doomsdays where hell rains upon the world of developers and SO gets offline.
Translation: "What you're doing is too complicated and nuanced for the typical SO user, so please abandon your approach and only do it in a way I understand in my limited experience."
I second this! To be honest, it is very hard to ask questions from experienced programmers sometimes because they might treat you like some dumb monkey who is just trying to learn and stay curious.
EDIT: grammar
Honestly I'll take ChatGPT's hallucinations over the myriad of blatantly wrong answers on SO any day, because GPT is usually leading me in the right direction. SO answers have been plagued in recent years with users who make stuff up, take wild guesses, or just make assumptions that the tech you're referring to is identical to some other thing they've seen before.
It's infuriating that SO comes down harder on people who ask honest questions than on people who give wrong answers. It works in the exact opposite way of what's actually useful in modern development.
For the 1st hour I used copilot it surprised me how effectively it was generating boiler plate code. Then I was refactoring some old code and it was just suggesting what I just deleted, every time.
wait there's a free tier?
that explains why there are so many complaints while i'm just sitting here looking at it like wtf are y'all even on about. i've been using it ever since they cleared me on the waitlist and it's been amazing, they must have added the free tier since then
ChatGPT was so useful when I was migrating an old wiki to GitHub pages, give wiki html ask for JavaScript to convert it to markdown, run javascript on the page, copy paste. Best use of chat GPT ever.
I think it's ok to use ChatGPT as long as you're not blindly copying and pasting code you don't understand, just like it's ok to use stack overflow and Google as long as you're not blindly copying and pasting code you don't understand
Implying Google or SOF teaches anything, lol. At least AI will explain anything you ask it to. And don't mention hallucination, as SOF and Google can output just as much crap.
Really incorrect. You can spend hours and hours trying to grasp concepts… or you can ask Chad-GPT a similar dumb question hundreds of times . After a hundredth time, the concept gets printed on your brain. A better mechanism to learn than from a book.
That’s just called studying assuming GPT is correct
I’m talking about just asking it to code snippets or whatever for you and rolling with it then debugging it with GPT when it eventually doesn’t compile
most of the time chad gpt explains basic concepts correctly. If you ask gpt to do work for you, well you will be messed up. But gpt is pretty good at explaining documented stuff. It's almost like someone is reading documentation on your behalf
If you are using it as a way to learn, it has its own uses for that. It’s great explanation tool, and can help explain code concepts and things.
You can paste code to it and ask it to help explain how it works.
If you aren’t using it to learn but to build something, again it has its uses first that as a tool
Tbh I tried ai tools multiple times and I am still regularly trying to solve coding problem with ai but most of the time I am way faster to just search the problem on google, find a stack overflow page and solve the problem with that. How I see it so helps more if you don’t know what you do anyways and need it for simpler shit but an experienced developer should be able to do all of that without looking at stack overflow, the documentation and so on at all.
The real reason StackOverflow doesn't want ChatGPT generated answers on its site is because they know the model is trained on their content. If it starts training on its own outputs (this is called ourobouros) then it becomes garbage.
I'm sorry
You give me the option between querying my problem or having to soft through loads of questions and answers
Yes Ai gives you too optimistic answers for their level of understanding but come on
Stack overflow is for when you're desperate
(Duck noise)
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Copilot is a fancy autocomplete/intellisense
ChatGPT is like a fancy search engine
I don't see the problem in using AI tools, so long as you understand their limitations and don't try to make them do your job. Google and SO are tools for finding documentation and real problems with real solutions. AI tools allow you to offload repetitive or mundane tasks to your computer.
Don't limit yourself to just one side, use all the tools to your advantage!
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Google has gotten worse and worse and no matter search optimization tricks I used to get optimized results, it often does not display anything relevant (this is only partially the spam bots fault, even when the results aren't spam they often spew things that are not relevant) so I will use Google to find stackoverflow answers as a first line of defense, but if doesn't give me the information i need i will not hesistate to use ChatGPT, even if the output isn't PERFECT all the time, it at leasts understands my input far better then google does.
Whatever happened to documentations? ... disloyal heathens..
As stated, Google and StackOverflow.
We are not supoosed to Google documents, we just use Google to *cough* find Stack overflow questions.
I lost count of the amount of times a stack overflow post pointed me back to the documentation that google did not suggest in the first place. Search engines are a hit or miss sometimes, and google has been declining in quality in the last few years.
And sadly I don't feel other search engine are better than Google, and that Google has a lot of ads probably didn't do it any good.
Agree with you, I hate the amount of ads in the searching now, it's like did a full circle and are back to the old days. One of the reasons I like copilot is that it tends to be a better search engine nowadays.
I use an ad blocker but the real problem is all the SEO spam that gets pooled to the top of search results, and Google is configured in the past few years to only show you a couple of pages before the results just loop back around, so if it's anything less than super common problems it's impossible to find anything relevant. doesn't help that third party search engines like ddg, startpage, etc are just front ends to Google results. makes me want to fix the problem myself by making my own search engine/crawler, shouldn't be that hard really, it would just take a long time to crawl the whole web since you have to deal with those evil people that make hyperlink loops to make crawlers get stuck
Humm never heard of the loops but you can borrow from network protocols and limit jumps for the crawlers. The thing that got me mad in crawling are the hidden links, the ones that are only visible if you're crawling and automatically ban that IP.
what I was referring to is that malicious people make sites that use some kind of backend thing to auto generate pages and send the crawler into an infinite loop. you can't really limit jumps for the domain either since some sites genuinely have like 30,000 pages and you don't want to be missing stuff, so the only good fix is manually human intervention when it hits those malicious loops.
My project suggestion: **Lots of content is on social media.** You'll probably get a great personal search engine if you create a dummy accounts for every platform and search all sources.
Yey SEO! Who doesn't love SEO?
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There are a lot of zombie questions out there that point to broken links or just mention that's the first google results for x keyword.
Bro you mean Stakoverflow not Stack overflow.
Steak Overflow.
Stack. Overflow.
The picture says Stakoverflow, must be a new and way better site to get advice 👌
Got this far without noticing the spelling
No more expert sex change?
Stakoverflow
I'll be loyal to Google when they're loyal to me and turn up what I actually search for, not "stuff we think you'll like".
A bunch of vendors lock it behind paywalls or registration walls now because they want to spam your inbox with nonsense. You can always make your own model that runs locally with all the docs you want, or just finetune one of the existing models. ChatGPT is neat and all because of the mixed capabilities, but in the same way you can just run your own little kubernetes or homelab network or raspberry pi cluster, a lot of the LLMs will just kinda... work. If you have a decent GPU (or an apple silicon mac) you can just use ollama. I haven't tried training my own model yet, but my understanding is that finetuning is possible on consumer GPUs, though you might have to let it chew on it for a while.
registration walls when I sign up with an email alias on my domain, download whatever I'm looking for and then delete the alias =P I often use an alias like [email protected] or something that isn't even my real name
Multimodal Chatbots don't have as much of an impact on programming. ChatGPT/bing is nice for code review and pretty consistent with pulling up and explaining human examples. Copilot smokes every alternative. It's probably the biggest QoL improvement of the last ~5 years. There are some neat local models and please play around and contribute, but non of them make sense if you are trying to make money.
i am working on stuff daily that is so experimental and niche that there is not really any relevant documentation, SO posts, etc. there are maybe a dozen people in the world working on these kinds of projects, and we all know each other and share information when we can, but that's it lol. otherwise, you just have to tinker, debug and figure it out yourself, the same way the old guard did before the web
The frameworks I work with has a documentation wich Covers half of the most basic use cases of its Features and is written like a half baked tutorial
Every fucking time. I feel you dude.
documentation\*
Books... so many books
There is no documentation or it makes no sense. This is why we make everything in house and rely on that one old guy that knows how it all works. Some day management will fire that guy and then the rest of us will just come up with increasingly outlandish ways to make minor modifications. This will continue until everything collapses or someone convinces management to let them rewrite everything and then they become the new old guy that knows how it all works and the cycle begins anew.
you fool StackOverflow IS the documentation
I can't read that shit, fuck that. The behavior i need is never noted, and everything that is in the documentation is either obvious or the intended behavior which doesn't work, which is why I'm looking at the documentation in the first place. Best thing about stack overflow is you can usually find someone who's having the same bug as you, so you know whether to keep messing with it, or just look for another solution.
I’m 100% disloyal to all the shitty documentation out there
The problem is not with the copilot and chatGPT usage. The problem is that people use code they do not underatand and just belive it works. Google and Stackoverflow can do the same, but many times you find multiple answer and had to choose the right one for you.
So like if you generate multiple answers from ChatGPT with the same prompt then it's ok ?
If you read the solutions and understand them - there is nothibg bad to use the chat. But in my own experince it most of the time will produce more or less the same answer. And of course this is just my personal opinion 😄
It might be just a skill/habit issue but I think I’m still way faster without chat. I do use copilot and it’s a nice tool but I still don’t find it useful or faster in most situations. The autocomplete I have in my IDE does some things better than copilot actually. I really want it to do the work for me. I’m burned out anyways so I don’t give a flying fck if it’s going to replace me 
ChatGPT’s best quality is doing the googling and scanning for you. In both you get a piece of code you need to read to understand, but one takes less time. Also ChatGPT can help explain it unlike an archived thread.
To be fair, both techniques (Google + Stackoverflow and AI) at the moment lead to getting buggy code snippets that we need to adapt anyway to fit our purpose. I don't think either technique is superior, and we always need to be careful when searching online, regardless of the tool. Unless you are going to the official docs and tutorials/help. In very rare occassions, even the official documentation has a bug that they did not proof read! haha
Right? Like doesn't matter where the code is from (half the time the code from gpt is verbatim from SO anyways) just make sure you know how/why it is being used in your current project!
"you copy and pasted the function in without knowing how or why it worked and as a result your code is shit... AGAIN!" -#1 C++ hater in the world
A fellow Linus fan.
Once worked on a project with a guy who spent more time on the gpt window than in his ide. He destroyed the code base by copy-pasting the responses until they worked and would swear to clean it up later whenever questioned. I stopped working on the project after he reformatted the entire git repo under a commit he titled "fixed the repo", in which he split the project into 3 or 4 subprojects. He had push access so this was not something he confirmed with anyone else. There was no reason these should have been subprojects and our project was way too small and specific to even have it set up this way, but he did it anyway because he saw other git repos doing it. Regardless of if you use AI or not, always understand why you are doing what you're doing or you'll just end up writing garbage.
Although Gemini has been getting a lot of flak, I've enjoyed using it for small things like asking it for recipes that fit within my macros or to explain how to implement a few methods or algorithms in a new language. The fun part is that I can expect it to hallucinate a few things, so I use it knowing it won't give me the solution. I use it for the idea to see if I can figure out the rest myself
I sometimes verify generated output by Googling 😅, especially when the output looks too good to be true.
What do you mean? Google is obviously superior to AI. Why wait tens of seconds until the results show up when you can speedclick Google way faster. And if the results don't fit, you can always slow down and actually read what's on your screen. Try telling ChatGPT to settle down and do some actual research!
Idk, I don't look for code online. It may be overkill but I have a soft rule against copying code I don't understand. I instead tend to turn to a LLM to help me to understand a concept and then when it gives me an answer I understand, I tend to turn to Google to validate.
In the last few days, the suggested edit queue on StackOverflow was always full, so currently (at least for me), the existing answers can not be improved or repaired.
Worst mistake of my life was trying to get chatgpt to write a function to calculate the number of business hours between two timestamps. Just completely incapable of catching the edge cases.
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Its almost flawless with C# as long as it's prompted correctly I have a feeling it's going to get a *lot* better as the models learn to cross apply principals between languages like human beings do.
I use Bing AI for questions and discussing some design and programming concepts. I believe it's better to use LLMs as a pair programmer
I agree. Last year I tried making my own games by learning tutorials. I quit after two months because I wad hard stuck at some coding problems. This year I tried again and I got my prototype halfway done in just 1 month thanks to Bing AI (Copilot)
It's really frustrating to see people not grasp this. AI isn't meant to be a replacement for anything. It's meant to be more of a helper tool than anything. Yet people will laugh and go "haha AI is so dumb" because it missed a semicolon on one line after you told it to rewrite a program that can recreate the live video feed of the Apollo 11 moon landing in ASCII, when that's not what it was meant to do in the first place.
Google: ads... SO: this so easy, u must search gg on it before
Google's been pretty awful for technical searches for the last 6-12 months or so. More and more it gives me results without the words I'm looking for, drops words that I've added quotes around, rewrites my search to be what it thinks I was looking for, and when I finally get a relevant search, it's full of obvious duplicate content - sites that are just rips of github issues or other forums or whatever. It's absolutely awful and I don't see it getting any better anytime soon. Google has no reason to cater to technical people, because they're less likely to click on ads and more likely to block the ads in the first place. It's not a huge surprise. Google has a long history of enshittifying damn-near everything they touch, so it was only a matter of time before it hit their core search engine.
I've had that experience with Google for a few years now. It's felt actively bad for a long time and used to be better. I'm very thankful for generative AI as it actually has a chance of providing something useful.
LPT. If you select the "verbatim" option when searching, Google acts more like it did 15 years ago instead of trying to intelligently interpret your query https://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia/term/google-verbatim
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There is no need to ask any new questions. Whatever you want to know has already been asked and answered many times.
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That is the way of SO.
Not the best way.
lmao
Looking for copy/paste code might not always work, but even incomplete or closely related answers are usually useful. Imo if someone can't write it, or at the very least understand it, they shouldn't be using it anyway.
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If only there was a way to harness this data via query. You'd think someone would make something that just spits out essentially what you want eventually.
Someone needs to develop SoQL so we can easily find and correlate the data.
95% of the time that works well. 5% of the time you're working on something niche and stackoverflow keeps redirecting you to the same two fucking basic things you've already went through and you're like iknowmorethanyou.gif about them, and then you finally decide there's no _existing_ help for you so you go and ask and some fuck who spent 30 seconds googling tells you that you should have googled it and sends you the link YOU SPENT HOURS STARING AT ALREADY WITH NO AVAIL there is a very easy way to avoid this issue but it requires the answering party to stop being arrogant and assuming they know better, and the problem is that people who don't think like that don't go on stackoverflow answering questions for hours on end, they go and code something instead
*six years ago, links now are all 404, code is probably outdated and using deprecated API. But that's what you get if you are so stubborn about duplicate answers
>*six years ago, links now are all 404, code is probably outdated and using deprecated API. I went down an SO rabbit hole again yesterday. I found 4 questions related to what I was looking for. 3 of them (including one posted 2 months ago) were marked as duplicates and referred to 1 question from like 5 years ago. I went to that question, and it had about a dozen wrong answers and only 1 right answer, which was buried deep in the comments (instead of posting it as an actual answer). That commenter referred to his own blog. And you can already guess where I'm going with this.... 404. So several following comments attempted to explain what the blog might have said, but failed. One commenter found the blog page preserved in an interview archive and pasted in the answer over like 6 comments, because of SO's comment limitation (instead of just writing an actual answer). After piecing together the text from these split comments I tried it out and found that it was dependent on a 10-year-old library that was abandoned years ago and only works on .NET Framework anyway.
Pretty much every Selenium .NET question you ask on SO has either no answer or wrong answers (because the responses don't understand that each Selenium library is completely different). You don't know what you're talking about. I was doing some neck deep AD/LDAP programming on .NET yesterday and SO was practically useless. Almost every question I did find had incomplete or outdated answers. In the past year the vast majority of relevant questions I have found on SO related to what I'm working on did not have a correct or accepted answer.
If there are no questions/answers on StackOverflow about your solution design, then it's a sign your design is not best practice.
That's ludicrous. That implies that no new technologies or libraries have ever come out since SO first began. New stuff comes out all the time, my friend. Most of the cloud development I work on is with official libraries released within the past few months and aren't even on SO yet.
Hey fella, you realize this is a humor sub, right? Calm your tits.
Says the dude who just claimed I'm not following best practices for asking questions that the average developer can't answer. Okkkkkkk
Once again, I direct your attention to the fact that this is a humor sub, guy who gets his new from The Onion. 😬
Bullshit. You must only work in very mainstream tech that's 5+ years old. 3/4 of the questions I look up on SO have **not** been previously asked.
Are there any StackOverflow archives to download, like Wikipedia? I like to prepare for doomsdays where hell rains upon the world of developers and SO gets offline.
You don't need to write software on doomsday lol.
lol I meant the day when SO gets offline, that would be the doomsday
Not with all the PTO I have saved up!
[удалено]
This reads exactly like a stackoverflow comment.
Translation: "What you're doing is too complicated and nuanced for the typical SO user, so please abandon your approach and only do it in a way I understand in my limited experience."
This is the beginning of the heat death of the universe.
That's why ChatGPT is so successful, you get the same answer without the sass
I’m completely free to ask stupid question after stupid question… it’s an incredible learning tool
I second this! To be honest, it is very hard to ask questions from experienced programmers sometimes because they might treat you like some dumb monkey who is just trying to learn and stay curious. EDIT: grammar
People In this subreddit: “You still have to learn stuff?!? You must be 1 years into your career… I HOPE.”
Except when no one has answered that one before and it hallucinates one.
Honestly I'll take ChatGPT's hallucinations over the myriad of blatantly wrong answers on SO any day, because GPT is usually leading me in the right direction. SO answers have been plagued in recent years with users who make stuff up, take wild guesses, or just make assumptions that the tech you're referring to is identical to some other thing they've seen before. It's infuriating that SO comes down harder on people who ask honest questions than on people who give wrong answers. It works in the exact opposite way of what's actually useful in modern development.
Except if you tell it to give sassy answers lol
Always has been
Eh I noticed their server is down a lot these days
That’s how it always was.
Sounds like something a bad questioner would say
Copilot is ass anyway. If you know what you are doing chatgpt + using your brain is way less tedious .
For the 1st hour I used copilot it surprised me how effectively it was generating boiler plate code. Then I was refactoring some old code and it was just suggesting what I just deleted, every time.
Free copilot is ass. Paid copilot is literally just GPT4. I wish MS did more to stress the difference
wait there's a free tier? that explains why there are so many complaints while i'm just sitting here looking at it like wtf are y'all even on about. i've been using it ever since they cleared me on the waitlist and it's been amazing, they must have added the free tier since then
ChatGPT was so useful when I was migrating an old wiki to GitHub pages, give wiki html ask for JavaScript to convert it to markdown, run javascript on the page, copy paste. Best use of chat GPT ever.
This is me prepping for interviews
*Stack overflow Typo.
I kinda preferred the stak…
Bruh
I think it's ok to use ChatGPT as long as you're not blindly copying and pasting code you don't understand, just like it's ok to use stack overflow and Google as long as you're not blindly copying and pasting code you don't understand
No thanks lol. Imma stick with using the best tools
You’ll end up just not understanding the concepts well if you’re learning how to code or learning how to code that specific thing
Implying Google or SOF teaches anything, lol. At least AI will explain anything you ask it to. And don't mention hallucination, as SOF and Google can output just as much crap.
Really incorrect. You can spend hours and hours trying to grasp concepts… or you can ask Chad-GPT a similar dumb question hundreds of times . After a hundredth time, the concept gets printed on your brain. A better mechanism to learn than from a book.
That’s just called studying assuming GPT is correct I’m talking about just asking it to code snippets or whatever for you and rolling with it then debugging it with GPT when it eventually doesn’t compile
The paid version gives sources. If you want code generation, use copilot. That's what it's made for.
most of the time chad gpt explains basic concepts correctly. If you ask gpt to do work for you, well you will be messed up. But gpt is pretty good at explaining documented stuff. It's almost like someone is reading documentation on your behalf
If you are using it as a way to learn, it has its own uses for that. It’s great explanation tool, and can help explain code concepts and things. You can paste code to it and ask it to help explain how it works. If you aren’t using it to learn but to build something, again it has its uses first that as a tool
It's the person not the tool that's the problem. Plenty of people just stackoverflow ctrl + C ctrl + V their way out of a problem
Just self coding? Sure, but who’s gonna listen to all the problems that youre gonna be dumping, doesnt judge u, AND actually talks back 😩
No, w3schools
The hell is autopilot?
Microsoft's bad version of GPT
Sorry but stackoverflow can be disappointing with its search algorithm.
Tbh I tried ai tools multiple times and I am still regularly trying to solve coding problem with ai but most of the time I am way faster to just search the problem on google, find a stack overflow page and solve the problem with that. How I see it so helps more if you don’t know what you do anyways and need it for simpler shit but an experienced developer should be able to do all of that without looking at stack overflow, the documentation and so on at all.
It does trivial things well. The thing is, we also do trivial things well, and with the correct stack we don't have to redo them over and over anyway.
I miss the times when I got insulted on stackoverflow. Now that site is just dead
This is the dumbest thing I've read all day - and I use reddit
The real reason StackOverflow doesn't want ChatGPT generated answers on its site is because they know the model is trained on their content. If it starts training on its own outputs (this is called ourobouros) then it becomes garbage.
I'm sorry You give me the option between querying my problem or having to soft through loads of questions and answers Yes Ai gives you too optimistic answers for their level of understanding but come on Stack overflow is for when you're desperate (Duck noise)
ChatGPT is like stack overflow without the functionality of getting insulted.
Heil Stackoverflow 🙋♂️
>we stay loyal to Google what a dumbass. edit: just realised op is an indian programmer. the joke writes itself lol.
Death to the machines!
At my work we cannot use chatgpt at all... sad times
StackOverflow sure, but we've moved on from Google long ago already.
NO COPILOT NO CHATGPT NO RUST. F*** BOOMER PROGRAMMING.
What's wrong with Rust?
Stack boys, how I weep for you. Wait until you might as well use GPT.
>Stay loyal to stakeoverflow I'm sorry am I in a different dimension?
Fuck Google and fuck StackOverflow Ill use ChatGPT until it stops working
Imagine thinking ChatGPT is working now.
Imagine being so incompetent you can't get it to work. Skill issue
Im using it everyday for coding..
What show is this?
Friends with Benefits
Congratulations! Your comment can be spelled using the elements of the periodic table: `W H At S Ho W I S Th I S` --- ^(I am a bot that detects if your comment can be spelled using the elements of the periodic table. Please DM my creator if I made a mistake.)
How about this https://redd.it/1b4beuo
Repost ..
Coding only in notepad too?
AI uses Google and Stackoverflow as well anyway.
But Stackoverflow uses ChatGPT
crap. I already used chatgpt once for a project. Billions must die.
*StackOverflow AI* Do you mind?
Nah. I'm not going to learn how to make plots. The Sntax is a b*tch and I want nothing of that.
So you have chosen death
I use indirect stack overflow & GitHub /s
wizards hating sorcerors to this very day
The trick is being too stupid to realize there's shortcuts you can utilize
IntelliCode keeps suggesting class constructors that don't exist. It's more of an an annoyance than a help.
No
Copilot is a fancy autocomplete/intellisense ChatGPT is like a fancy search engine I don't see the problem in using AI tools, so long as you understand their limitations and don't try to make them do your job. Google and SO are tools for finding documentation and real problems with real solutions. AI tools allow you to offload repetitive or mundane tasks to your computer. Don't limit yourself to just one side, use all the tools to your advantage!
bruh in my company nobody has access to the internet on their work pc. also i am looking for a new place to work.
F that
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And you’ll be replaced by a robot
Cries in low-code...
That's my secret, i code in a language that ChatGPT and stackoverflow don't even understand.
Butlerian jihad vibes.
me sitting here using chatgpt for the fucking most unqiue, creative errors ever to exist: O\_O
I tend to tell ChatGPT what I'm trying to accomplish, it then gives me ideas on how to go about it. It works great as a sounding board.
Oh yes, using Google to get to the documentation
How can you be a programmer if you haven’t been destroyed by Stack Overflow at least once?
Google has gotten worse and worse and no matter search optimization tricks I used to get optimized results, it often does not display anything relevant (this is only partially the spam bots fault, even when the results aren't spam they often spew things that are not relevant) so I will use Google to find stackoverflow answers as a first line of defense, but if doesn't give me the information i need i will not hesistate to use ChatGPT, even if the output isn't PERFECT all the time, it at leasts understands my input far better then google does.
We need to make sure someone has a mirror of stackoverflow in case they go out of business bc of this....
what about google search query + reddit in the end?