this post was submitted on 20 May 2025
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Maybe StackOverflow is dying because its community is full of incredibly toxic, passive-aggressive and hostile basement dwellers who will berate, downvote and lock the threads of anybody who dares ask a programming question. Genuinely the kind of people you often see moderating subreddits or Discord servers who have never been punched in the face.
ChatGPT hammered the final nail in the site's coffin because it's now become a tool where you can ask specific programming questions and likely get an answer that isn't "use the search bar you fucking dipshit. Question closed as off-topic."
Well it might goes both ways. People are not afraid to ask stupid questions to AI. And at the same time, AI will not judge the user.
Eh, they will complain that "ai is stupid" when the actual issue is pepple's inability to even describe their problem. We already see this happen.
Another big problem is that we've been collectively trying to shoehorn everybody into programming careers for the better part of two decades. In fact, "just learn to code" is often thrown around by people in response to the prospect of AI automating and taking over everybody's jobs.
What they don't understand is that coding is actually very difficult, especially for people who are bad at math, which is a significant portion of the population if you look at statistics, grades, test scores, etc. Expecting a lowly paid call center worker who lost their job to AI to suddenly open up Visual Studio and write any code is a fools errand.
I bring this up because I think there's a correllation between people asking low-quality questions and people being pushed into making a career move into tech.
I disagree tbh. I'm a software dev with 20+ years of experience and I think most coding is not very difficult relative to other jobs. The problem is that coding requires specific motivation because the information breadth is insane compared to other professions and that becomes incredibly overwhelming for many people are not stubborn in a specific sort of way.
I think you have a point here regarding corellation between low-quality questions and people "who don't want to be here" - that's probably true.
Though people generally really suck at describing their issues and that goes way beyond code. LLMs are making this even more apparent because a dude who can describe everything is having a great time and others just yell "LLMs suck and have no value" so the difference is crazy.
There's something with our society where introspection and detail is not natural and very difficult to learn for some people.
Agreed. There are definitely many areas of software to do require/benefit from good math skills. But software is an incredibly diverse field. Kids, if you're interested in programming/software, there are plenty of areas you can do just fine in with varying levels of math skills.