Stack Overflow is embracing, not fighting, AI

Stack Overflow, the question-and-answer site that’s become an essential reference tool for coders across the world, announced concrete plans last week to start answering questions through generative AI.

The platform’s core, human-powered question-and-answer interface isn’t going away, CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar tells Fast Company. “There’s always going to be a need for some place where people are actually contributing content and new information,” he says, and developers are going to continue to want to help each other—and show off their knowledge—as new technologies evolve. In fact, the site will host a new subsite focused on generative AI-related questions and answers, and a more general discussion forum geared around natural language processing.

But a new conversational search tool, which will appear first in a private alpha test, will let users pose queries and receive answers based on Stack Overflow’s database of over 58 million questions and answers, Chandrasekar revealed in a Thursday blog post and a talk at WeAreDevelopers World Congress in Berlin. 

Stack Overflow for Teams, the company’s business-focused offering, will also gain the ability to import custom documents, letting the AI answer questions based on internal documentation and knowledge bases as well as public questions and answers. Corporate users will additionally be able to query the AI through a new chatbot dubbed StackPlusOne, which will be accessible through Slack. A plug-in for Visual Studio Code, Microsoft’s popular development environment, will also let programmers seek guidance from the AI system. 

The moves come as AI tools like Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot and even general purpose generative AI systems like ChatGPT are increasingly being used to generate code. “It really is kind of amazing to see how much that accelerates programmers, like everybody that I talked to feels like it’s speeding them up by 30%,” says Stack Overflow cofounder Joel Spolsky, predicting some of the more rote aspects of programming may increasingly simply be automated. “It’s speeding them up by freeing them from worrying about little details.”

Chandrasekar says some recent reports about decreased traffic to Stack Overflow, which some coders are replacing with queries to AI tools, aren’t accurate, though the company did announce in May it was cutting its workforce by about 10%, citing a push toward profitability and “macroeconomic pressures.” The company has also reportedly seen some dissatisfaction among community moderators, who’ve expressed concern about incorrect, AI-generated answers being posted to the site, even as rank-and-file users sometimes find the moderation process to be intimidating.  

Ideally, AI will ultimately make asking questions on the site more welcoming to newcomers, including younger programmers, says Chandrasekar, since basic inquiries can be simply answered by software instead of tersely flagged as duplicates or otherwise rejected. “When I asked my first question on Stack Overflow, I got a slap on the wrist,” Chandrasekar recalls. “And, you know, it wasn’t a great feeling. We believe this capability will just prevent those sort of experiences from happening.”

Then, more detailed or novel inquiries can be addressed by the site’s experts, with the correct solution added to the site’s Q&A database, where others with the same issues can access it through either traditional searches or AI-powered inquiries. That, says Spolsky, is ultimately the core of what the site has to offer, even if AI tools mean fewer visits from coders with more common questions.

“If they never come to Stack Overflow, we’ve lost some traffic metric, which is honestly a vanity metric,” he says. “But if programmers have gotten their questions answered faster, that’s good for us, and if they’re not tempted to ask a question that’s already been asked 1,000 times on the website, that’s honestly also good for us, even though you don’t get the vanity metric of a page view.”