Stack Overflow Will Embrace Generative AI After All. Will Overflow AI Address an Existential Risk?

The new solutions will launch in a restricted Alpha in August

Stack Overflow today announced the roadmap for Overflow AI, the company’s new set of generative AI-based tools. This marks a significant shift from Stack Overflow’s initial response to the ChatGPT moment in December 2023. Prashanth Chandrasekar, Stack Overflow’s CEO, said in a blog post published today:

Today marks the beginning of a new and exciting era for Stack Overflow. We are announcing our roadmap for the integration of generative AI into our public platform, Stack Overflow for Teams, and brand new product areas, like an IDE integration that brings the vast knowledge of 58 million questions and answers from our community right into the area where developers find focus and get work done. We’re putting all this work under the umbrella of OverflowAI. 

Standard Knowledge Base Features

Overflow AI does not appear to be breaking any new ground in its announced roadmap features. It will include new semantic search capabilities to replace keyword searches that the website previously employed. Although the video demo shows an answer in response to a query, it appears that it is not a generated answer, but rather an answer from an actual Stack Overflow post.

“We’ll be adding semantic search in a private Alpha, built on top of a vector database, so that the responses generated from a search query can more intelligently align with the topics the user is researching…We’re looking at ways where responses generated can be attributed and cited, using the highly trusted knowledge from the more than 58 million questions and answers in Stack Overflow,” wrote Chandrasekar.

The wording in these statements suggests the company is still very early in its technology development. It indicates to me that Overflow AI may start by providing better search results as opposed to synthesized answers that are common when using ChatGPT, Bard, or other chat native generative AI tools. Stack Overflow also still needs to figure out how to add the citations it included liberally in the canned video demo.

In addition to standard search, Overflow AI, through extensions, will also integrate into Visual Studio and Slack. That is expected to save developers the disruption of switching between their development environment and a browser when questions arise.

Other features are limited to Stack Overflow for Teams, the company’s knowledge management solution for developer teams. These include custom knowledge repositories with company-specific information and enhanced search for these databases.

The Generative AI Resistance

Stack Overflow staked out a draconian and skeptical approach to generative AI models that write and interpret software code not too long ago. In December 2022, you might even say the tone was confrontations to generative code writers in general, and ChatGPT in particular. The policy said (emphasis theirs):

All use of generative AI (e.g., ChatGPT¹ and other LLMs) is banned when posting content on Stack Overflow.

This includes "asking" the question to an AI generator then copy-pasting its output as well as using an AI generator to "reword" your answers.

…

The primary problem is that while the answers which ChatGPT and other generative AI technologies produce have a high rate of being incorrect, they typically look like the answers might be good and the answers are very easy to produce. There are also many people trying out ChatGPT and other generative AI technologies to create answers, without the expertise or willingness to verify that the answer is correct prior to posting. Because such answers are so easy to produce, a large number of people are posting a lot of answers. The volume of these answers (thousands) and the fact that the answers often require a detailed read by someone with significant subject matter expertise in order to determine that the answer is actually bad has effectively swamped our volunteer-based quality curation infrastructure.

As such, we need to reduce the volume of these posts and we need to be able to deal with the ones which are posted quickly, which means dealing with users, rather than individual posts.

So, for now, the use of ChatGPT or other generative AI technologies to create posts or other content here on Stack Overflow is not permitted. If a user is believed to have used ChatGPT or other generative AI technologies after the posting of this temporary policy, sanctions will be imposed to prevent them from continuing to post such content, even if the posts would otherwise be acceptable.

The initial response was not about what the new capabilities could enable to help developers but about the risk of incorrect information and the burden placed on the company and its community. This is the type of reaction you might expect from a risk-averse mature company in a mature industry.

By April, Chandrasekar was talking about investing in generative AI, which led directly to today’s announcement. There was also a growing sense of how generative AI solutions might improve the Stack Overflow experience for users.

VentureBeat had a humorous and familiar take on the Stack Overflow culture with its sub-headline, “Overflow AI doesn’t replace the Stack Overflow community, but it might be friendlier.” The article continued:

The community however isn’t always as kind or as forgiving as it could be to certain types of questions. Chandrasekar recounted an incident when he first joined Stack Overflow in 2019 and he posted a question on the public forums. 

“I asked a very poorly worded question and I got completely slapped on the wrist,” he said. “I can’t even imagine the experience for a 17-year-old as an example, or somebody who is very early on in their career.”

Overflow AI will allow users of all experience levels to get a lot more value out of the platform very quickly, because users don’t have to go through the potential hurdles that can sometimes be associated with community feedback. “It just takes a lot of inefficiency out of the system,” said Chandrasekar.

An Existential Threat

What caused the turnaround and gradual embrace of generative AI? The most charitable view is that the team was initially overwhelmed and had to take action to “protect” the integrity of its knowledge base from the influx of generative AI produced content, that was sometimes wrong or frequently wrong, as the company contests. Over time, the story continues with Stack Overflow figuring out how to domesticate the wild generative AI beast, and it is now thoughtfully implementing a number of features to assist developers.

Another story could be told about a typical backlash response to unexpected and disruptive change that was followed by a realization that the technology not only have value but may just be critical to the company's future. Maybe a bit of both stories are true.

By April 2023, the impact of ChatGPT on Stack Overflow was becoming apparent. SimilarWeb reported that Stack Overflow showed a consistent downward trend in website visits beginning in early 2022.

The 6% monthly decline was initially attributed to a rise in resources available through GitHub. Another contributor to the decline was likely the popularity of GitHub’s Copilot code generator. If Copilot is filling in the code for you, there is no need to sift through dozens of Stack Overflow posts to find the answer.

SimilarWeb figures in March showed another 13.9% decline for Stack Overflow while ChatGPT use continued to rise quickly, albeit for many use cases beyond software development. GitHub’s growing knowledge base became a direct competitor. GitHub Copilot’s code writing and completion tools became a substitute for researching your answer in a knowledge base. ChatGPT and other tools extended that competition further.

Generative AI presents an existential risk to structured knowledge base companies such as Stack Overflow and Quora. Would users rather have an answer, or ten links/posts they can click on individually to see if they are relevant? Google faces a similar challenge in search.

Users typically want answers. This is why ChatGPT, Bard, Bing Chat, Copilot, and other solutions could make Stack Overflow irrelevant—and quickly.

A Valuable Knowledge Base and Community

However, expert-curated answers can directly address the problem of confidently presented large language model (LLM) produced hallucinations. They can also fill users’ need to further validate information or research topics. This is where Stack Overflow can be an important feature of generative AI-led developer solutions. A validated source of truth is valuable.

Note that I used the term feature. Knowledge bases are features of solutions, but Stack Overflow is positioned as a product. This was appropriate when the development environments didn’t have expert advice baked in. It suddenly looks more valuable to have access to that knowledge base from within the solution. Stack Overflow’s integration with Visual Studio is a recognition of what appears to be an inevitability.

Stack Overflow may soon recognize that its community is a more sustainable and valuable asset than the 58 million entries in its knowledge base. The community made the knowledge base’s content and quality possible. A community is also harder to replicate.

The need for sharing new expertise and answering new questions will endure. Stack Overflow’s community could help it remain relevant and important for a long time if it can keep the community together and contributing to the general corpus of knowledge.

A bright future could also be ahead if access to Stack Overflow’s knowledge base is offered within all of the leading IDE’s and generative AI coding solutions. They all could use a reference source of truth to make it easier for developers to validate the code suggestions or provide more context on the approach.

Stack Overflow seems to be headed in a more positive direction. The question is whether company leadership realizes how precarious its competitive position is. Innovators often struggle to adapt to the next wave of disruption. Maybe today’s tentative steps into generative AI will lead to bolder and more assured action in the coming months.