Back in 2008, two programmers had the idea to expand pair programming to the whole world. All they needed was some website where programmers could ask their peers questions, and answering questions they had an idea of how to answer. All of that was gamified by some kind of hacker rank, and the source of these points you could collect were the people who found your answers useful.

And while I don’t actually agree with everything they brought to the table (Joel Spolsky is the man behind what we all hate about MS Office, “Visual Basic for Applications”, and Jeff Atwood made sure it had a hard start by pulling in his experience as a Microsoft consultant - they would have had an easier time running it on a LAMP kind of service, and Stack Overflow was very unstable in the early days, but I digress), it kinda worked. For a time. Until people tried to game the game, and that’s when it got ugly.

But no matter the small problems and human cost, for years Stack Overflow was the place to go to as a programmer, so much so that HR not understanding programmers was demonstrated by the (fictious? real? I don’t know) example of blocking Stack Overflow at the firewall level to get “really good software”.

And if you ask AI about a software problem now, it’ll very likely just give you the answer somebody gave on Stack Overflow. Not that that is a bad thing per se, but as we know AI just steals knowledge without attributions, so we don’t really know where this exact answer really came from. But there have been cases where it has been proven, usually because the answer was wrong and the AI didn’t catch it.

But now, due to the same AI culture, Stack Overflow is dying. Programmers just ask the AI directly, if they don’t just let it code the whole thing. And if you ask a question on Stack Overflow, chances are it’ll be either marked as duplicate (because many questions have been asked there, and even if it’s not true that every question is a duplicate, many of them are, and even more are perceived as duplicates even though they aren’t). Stack Overflow’s way to do things is simply not that interesting anymore. And we lost something because of it, people are simply not interested in learning stuff anymore. What’s the point, just ask the AI. And I have ranted in another article about why that is a bad idea.

So this article could just as well have been named “Death of the Curious Programmer”. And curious programmers, like me, will be the exception rather than the rule in the future. Please convince me of the opposite, but I guess you will not be able to, nor will your AI.