Humans asking other humans is coming to an end, as the declining number of new questions on StackOverflow suggests. Weirdly, I just now realized that actual humans used their spare time to answer questions of strangers on StackOverflow. Awesome!

However, asking an LLM for help with programming issues is becoming much more popular these days. You trade waiting time and uncertainty for a clear, kind, and well-structured answer. Sure, sometimes the LLM hallucinates some function parameters or command-line options that do not exist, but mostly you get a good direction where to look. To me this trade is good enough to take it often, even though the energy consumption is bugging me a lot.

But what about future software where no Stack Overflow discussion exists, since nobody ever asked fellow humans? LLMs then rely on well-written documentation and source code. Their response quality depends on the availability of those. For many simple questions, the LLM might give a good enough answer from existing resources (if already trained on them). However, I believe, for more complex questions, you still need to fall back to asking other humans. Giving up on the instant answer and taking the slow manual path via a forum answer. I haven’t really encountered this path, but I wonder how this will shape future software development. I can imagine that people will use more “workarounds” suggested by LLMs, even though there exists a specialized function for it, which the LLM does not know about.

I’m a bit nostalgic now: I never appreciated the time that people put into their Stack Overflow answers. And now people don’t really ask anymore. But I think a baseline of new questions will remain. Maybe their complexity will increase, and they are actually new questions.