alt Hacker NewsWhat I always appreciate about SO is the dialogue between commenters. LLMs give one answer, or bullet points around a theme, or just dump a load of code in your IDE. SO gives a debate, in which the finer points of an issue are thrashed out, with the best answers (by and large) floating to the top.
SO, at its best, is numerous highly-experienced and intelligent humans trying to demonstrate how clever they are. A bit like HN, you learn from watching the back and forth. I don't think this is something that LLMs can ever replicate. They don't have the egos and they certainly don't have the experience.
Whatever people's gripes about the site, I learned a hell of a lot from it. I still find solutions there, and think a world without it would be worse.
Replies
SO also isn't afraid to tell you that your question is stupid and you should do it a better way.
Some people take that as a personal attack, but it can be more helpful than a detailed response to the wrong question.
> What I always appreciate about SO is the dialogue between commenters.
Stack Overflow is explicitly not for "dialogue", recent experiments (which are generally not well received by the regulars on the meta site) notwithstanding. The purpose of the comments on questions is to help refine the question and ensure it meets standards, and in some cases serve other meta purposes like pointing at different-but-related questions to help future readers find what they're looking for. Comments are generally subject to deletion at any time and were originally designed to be visually minimal. They are not part of the core experience.
Of course, the new ownership is undoing all of that, because of engagement metrics and such.
> I don't think this is something that LLMs can ever replicate. They don't have the egos and they certainly don't have the experience
Interesting question - the result is just words so surely a LLM can simulate an ego. Feed it the Linux kernel mailing list?
Isn’t back and forth exactly what the new MoE thinking models attempt to simulate?
And if they don’t have the experience that is just a question of tokens?
I don't know if this is still the case but back in the day people would often redirect comments to some stackoverflow chat feature, the links to which would always return 404 not found errors.
This comment and the parent one make me realize that people who answer probably value the exchange between experts more than the answer.
Perhaps the antidote involves a drop of the poison.
Let an LLM answer first, then let humans collaborate to improve the answer.
Bonus: if you can safeguard it, the improved answer can be used to train a proprietary model.
You can ask an LLM to provide multiple approaches to solutions and explore the pros and cons of each, then you can drill down and elaborate on particular ones. It works very well.
The fundamental difference between asking on SO and asking an LLM is that SO is a public forum, and an LLM will be communicated with in private. This has a lot of implications, most of which surround the ability for people to review and correct bad information.