Surely the fundamental difference is one asks actual humans who know what's right vs statistical models that are right by accident.

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ijidak 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Providing context to ask a Stack Overflow question was time-consuming.

In the time it takes to properly format and ask a question on Stack Overflow, an engineer can iterate through multiple bad LLM responses and eventually get to the right one.

The stats tell the uncomfortable truth. LLMs are a better overall experience than Stack Overflow, even after accounting for inaccurate answers from the LLM.

Don't forget, human answers on Stack Overflow were also often wrong or delayed by hours or days.

I think we're romanticizing the quality of the average human response on Stack Overflow.

	▲	matt_kantor 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The purpose of StackOverflow was never to get askers quick answers to their specific questions. Its purpose is to create a living knowledge repository of problems and solutions which future folk may benefit from. Asking a question on StackOverflow is more like adding an article to Wikipedia than pinging a colleague for help. If someone doesn't care about contributing to such a repository then they should ask their question elsewhere (this was true even before the rise of LLMs). StackOverflow itself attempts to explain this in various ways, but obviously not sufficiently as this is an incredibly common misconception.
	▲	fireflash38 4 days ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		That's only because of LLMs consuming pre-existing discussions on SO. They aren't creating novel solutions.
	▲	specproc 4 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		What I'm appreciating here is the quality of the _best_ human responses on SO. There are always a number of ways to solve a problem. A good SO response gives both a path forward, and an explanation why, in the context of other possible options, this is the way to do things. LLMs do not automatically think of performance, maintainability, edge cases etc when providing a response, in no small part because they do not think. An LLM will write you a regex HTML parser.[0] The stats look bleak for SO. Perhaps there's a better "experience" with LLMs, but my point is that this is to our detriment as a community. [^0]: He comes, https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open...

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stocksinsmocks 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Humans do not know what’s right. What’s worse is the phenomenon of people who don’t actually know but want to seem like they know so they ask the person with the question for follow up information that is meaningless and irrelevant to the question.

Hey, can you show me the log files?

Sure here you go. Please help!

Hmm, I don’t really know what I’m looking for in these. Good luck!

	▲	4 days ago \| parent [-]
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