I find this thought really interesting, although I wouldn’t attribute the decline of Stack Overflow to AI alone.

I used to use Stack Overflow a lot myself. In the development department I worked in back then, it was quite normal for us to discuss problems there and work together on finding solutions. That was one of its greatest strengths for me: you didn’t just get one answer, but often different approaches, experiences, and insights from other developers.

At the same time, I also noticed the other side. Especially for newcomers, the way people interacted with them could sometimes be rather unfriendly. A question would quickly be closed, someone would give it a downvote, and only afterwards might you get an explanation of what was actually wrong with it. For someone just starting out, that isn’t exactly an inviting environment.

And then AI arrived.

Today, I no longer have to find the perfect search query, work my way through ten different answers, and figure out which one actually applies to my problem. I can simply describe what I’m trying to do and get an explanation, a possible solution, and often even the appropriate code.

So AI has certainly taken over a large part of what made Stack Overflow so valuable in the first place. But perhaps it has also exposed a weakness that was already there.

What I find particularly interesting is the thought you raise yourself at the end of the article: What happens to the internet if, eventually, hardly anyone documents their experiences publicly anymore because most people simply ask their AI?

Because AI can explain existing knowledge wonderfully and combine it in new ways. But someone still has to create that knowledge and write it down in the first place.

Perhaps that is the real challenge of the coming years: not access to knowledge, but maintaining the incentive to continue sharing new knowledge with others.

Edit: I actually only meant to write a short comment about how much I like the picture in your post. Somehow, it turned into a small reflection on Stack Overflow, AI, and the future of shared knowledge. 😉