People are not using it any more as any AI assistant will give you the answer in seconds, perfectly adapted to your use case and with an easy way to ask follow up questions.
StackOverflow was always just an "answer machine".
They wanted it to be a community, but it never was.
Anyway, I'm learning so much more so much better than I ever have before. Turns out the ultimate slop tools are also the ultimate learning tools if you use 'em right.
Today LLMs have completely replaced the original role of StackOverflow.
If the LLMs could get the same results by just reading documentation and source code, then the content on programming forums would be worth nothing, yet AI companies scrape them constantly... why?
Do we have reason to think that they scrape them more often than they scrape other stuff? (Honest question, I have no idea.)
Doesn't Stackoverflow exist because people can in fact not read the documentation or source code, at least not to the point where it helps them understand their problem.
Yes; not sure how this is relevant to LLMs. One of the most impressive things I've seen change in the last few months is that they don't think twice about cloning a repo of linked-to-my-app code to analyze it to determine a solution. Or even disassemble closed-source object code to find an answer!
With agentic speed/capability, the calculus of "eh let's experiment and explore from the outside a little first" vs. "let's just read the dependencies (whose codebases I'm not familiar with), potentially including the binary itself, and figure out exactly what's going wrong" changes. So I think what's valuable in terms of ancillary info for technical topics is changing.