The purpose of StackOverflow was never to get askers quick answers to their specific questions. Its purpose is to create a living knowledge repository of problems and solutions which future folk may benefit from. Asking a question on StackOverflow is more like adding an article to Wikipedia than pinging a colleague for help.

If someone doesn't care about contributing to such a repository then they should ask their question elsewhere (this was true even before the rise of LLMs).

StackOverflow itself attempts to explain this in various ways, but obviously not sufficiently as this is an incredibly common misconception.

That's only because of LLMs consuming pre-existing discussions on SO. They aren't creating novel solutions.

What I'm appreciating here is the quality of the _best_ human responses on SO.

There are always a number of ways to solve a problem. A good SO response gives both a path forward, and an explanation why, in the context of other possible options, this is the way to do things.

LLMs do not automatically think of performance, maintainability, edge cases etc when providing a response, in no small part because they do not think.

An LLM will write you a regex HTML parser.[0]

The stats look bleak for SO. Perhaps there's a better "experience" with LLMs, but my point is that this is to our detriment as a community.

[^0]: He comes, https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open...