The Downfall of Stack Overflow

Gerggely Orosz of Pragmatic Engineer dove into Ayhan Fuat Çelik’s analysis of and speculated that coding assistants like Copilot, Cody, ChatGPT are partly to blame. He speculates that engineers are reaching for AI chatbots for code questions, and it’s hurting Stack Overflow’s traffic.

So question is long term what happens? Do the chatbot answer slowly degrade or become outdated? Or does the model collapse entirely and start spitting out vague subroutines that never compile?

One thing about AI, it is only as good as the training set. Once you start feeding garbage data or cut off data entirely the value of the model starts to decline rapidly.