Sad? No. A good LLM is vastly better than SO ever was. An LLM won't close your question for being off-topic in the opinion of some people but not others. It won't flame you for failing to phrase your question optimally, or argue about exactly which site it should have been posted on. It won't "close as duplicate" because a vaguely-similar question was asked 10 years ago in a completely-different context (and never really got a great answer back then).

Moreover, the LLM has access to all instances of similar problems, while a human can only read one SO page at a time.

The question of what will replace SO in future models, though, is a valid one. People don't realize what a massive advantage Google has over everyone else in that regard. So many site owners go out of their way to try to block OpenAI's crawlers, while simultaneously trying to attract Google's.

What's sad about it is that SO was yet another place for humans to interact that is now dead.

I was part of various forums 15 years ago where I could talk shop about many technical things, and they're all gone without any real substitute.

> People don't realize what a massive advantage Google has over everyone else in that regard. Site owners go out of their way to try to block OpenAI's crawlers, while simultaneously trying to attract Google's.

Not really. Website operators can only block live searches from LLM providers like requests made when someone asks a question on chatgpt.com, only because of the quirk that OpenAI makes the request from their server as a quick hack.

We're quickly moving past that as LLMs just make the request from your device with your browser if it has to (to click "I am not a robot").

As for scraping the internet for training data, those requests are basically impossible to block and don't have anything in common with live answer requests made to answer a prompt.