StackOverflow has published recently its latest stats about usage - and apparently, starting with the public access on ChatGPT, the service’s usage has decreased with ~50%. Everybody has rushed in saying that probably the Internet will start forgetting what SO did over this whole time, but I doubt this is the case. Actually, these stats will probably pump back as ChatGPT is not able to answer the latest tech trends and it shouldn’t - it needs new training data, traning data which is now becoming harder to fetch than it was before (see the reddit drama). (source with some nice graphs)
Where will SO become useless? On simple questions - yep, any good enough LLM with enough data digested will be able to answer those. Plus, the adoption of Copilot clearly underlines this.
What’s SO’s power? The community. You’ll be able to get answers from real people on complex things. Complex question - complex answer, give me a human for this! Same goes for any other service where you’re requesting help - first, you go past a robot, but if your query is complex enough, you’ll escalate for a human operator.
Why could still SO become obsolete? If they’ll lose their community. This could happen as their mods seem to be already tired of begginers posting duplicate questions. And it’s probably this frustration which might scare new members.
Let’s call it the boomerang effect - once the old data is obsolete, automated systems won’t be able to fulfill new ansers until the new cool kids aka tech bits get ingested in the models.