It's too dry, let's seed the clouds a bit

Author

Christian Duvall
July 28, 2023

While James Cameron thinks he’s the modern day Nostradamus, we are more like a magic eight ball – if you shake us enough times, you’ll eventually get an answer you like.

Here’s what we got for you:

  • StackOverflow’s misguided bet on AI

  • Links and whatnot

Here’s what you got for us:

  • Please share this post on social media! It really helps us gain additional reach. (check out the handy links above)

  • Take part in our poll below! Be part of shaping our future content.

StackOverflow’s misguided bet on AI

For those of you outside of the developer community, this topic might not seem very exciting, but it is the perfect little effigy of today’s socio-technological landscape to be burned and beaten to a pulp. I believe there is something to be learned in all of it.

First a quick history lesson. StackOverflow (Stack) launched in 2008, with a simple and zealous mission.

It is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate intent of collectively increasing the sum total of good programming knowledge in the world. No matter what programming language you use, or what operating system you call home. Better programming is our goal.

Stack became the Google for nascent programmers, inadvertently ushering in an era of low-skill engineers who would use the site to handle any and all of their problems with an inept copy and paste.

Your average Stack enjoyer

Better programming, not achieved.

In response, the site runners and moderators grew to be increasingly draconian and dogmatic. Anything outside of the rolling boundaries of what was proper, was met with great derision. Groupthink was allowed to run amok by “high reputation participants” who could simply edit a well-formed and correct answer to reflect homogenized “best practices”.

Possible duplicate question; See “Why am I so stupid?”

Although amazing things still seemed to slipped through the cracks, the community started to feel more and more exclusionary. Stack felt like a home for the few – like a wikipedia clone that you only use to find information already curated by the chosen.

Here in 2023, the site has lost a lot of traction (35-50% EMA over 12 months) and the leaders of the company that was recently purchased for $1.8 billion have decided that they know why.

On July 27, 2023 CEO Prasanth Chandrasekar announced OverflowAI – a brand new LLM-based generative AI suite that tackles the heart of the problem as they see it: people

It may seem like an obvious play in this post-ChatGPT era to slap some random AI on an existing solution and call it a day, but this speaks to the distance between 2008 and 2023 ever so eloquently.

The tool feels a lot like modern-era customer support:

  • Let us help you to not bother us with questions easily answered elsewhere

  • Let us help you not get mocked for writing a poorly-written question

  • Let me show you that – as per my last email – we already answered this

  • Let’s make sure we use the homogenized data we’ve curated to train this tool, so it doesn’t provide an answer that is improperly correct

In other words – it further strips any sense of community from what was left of the community. With tools like GitHub’s Copilot and many, many others in this space, why would people return to just to get the Stack experience enhanced by more soulless interactions?

This is how the last 9 months have felt across all spaces. Companies believing that “lack of AI” is the reason that they are no longer connecting with their customers in a meaningful way. ChatGPT did not replace humanity – we did.

I predict that we will see a massive bungie-cord effect in the coming years. A high-premium is to placed on getting a human experience in places where they can no longer be found. Connection over perfection.

Sponsor

This issue is brought to you by Rainwell Technical Consulting.

A lot of founders struggle with the same questions.

  • How do we get from MVP to a scalable, effective product?

  • Is our current technology holding us back?

  • What type of technical organization is best for us?

  • How do we know we’re hiring the right technical employees?

At Rainwell Technical Consulting, we help companies gain the confidence to know their tech is heading the right direction, so they can focus on solving the big problems.

Email me ([email protected]) to discuss how these questions might not be so scary.

If you’d like to sponsor future issues: [email protected]