Kids these days. Kids with their fancy GitHub Copilots and Cursor IDEs, whispering sweet nothings to LLMs like “how do I center a div?” or “what's the correct order of decorators?” It wasn’t always like this.

Back in the not-so-distant past (like, all the way in 2021), when a stack trace mocked you like a haunted house of errors, there was one place you could turn: Stack Overflow.

Reflecting on Stack Overflow

Look, Stack Overflow isn’t even dead. It's still very much around, contributing valuable things to the developer community like its annual survey with salary transparency, tooling trends, and the reminder that 90% of developers are 25- to 34-year-old dudes who love dark mode and Python or TypeScript. For years, it was the go-to place when you hit a wall. You’d search for your bug, maybe post a question, and then wait to be quietly shamed and told to RTFM.

But now? You can throw a janky, half-coherent prompt at an AI model, maybe even just paste your entire stack trace with a ‘plz fix.’ And you know what? It works. Usually.

To the boomers at the command line who say “kids these days don’t know how to troubleshoot,” I say: you sound like someone who rejected IDEs because “real programmers write code in Notepad.” AI tools are just the next step in the long evolution of how we write code. Yes, they can hallucinate. Yes, you still need to understand what you're doing. But also, I will continue to use them until they bury me in a JavaScript-littered grave.

The Stack Overflow Experience

Stack Overflow was never exactly a warm, convivial place for developers of all levels to swap ideas and support each other. It felt more like getting help from a grumpy, anonymous wizard who answered all your questions in Latin. Sure, the answers were often technically correct and genuinely helpful, but it wasn’t kindergarten. You had to come prepared.

And if you were a beginner? Forget it. Asking “simple” questions often meant walking into a digital buzzsaw. Stack Overflow themselves has even acknowledged this problem in the past. AI, by contrast, doesn't roll its eyes at you. It just tries to help—even if your prompt is “ELI5 promise and await for the sixth time please.”

Programmers are always in flux—learning new things, forgetting old ones, Googling the same regex pattern for the eighth time in a week. I’ve been a professional developer for over a decade and I still can’t parse dates without searching for the right magical incantation. We've all asked “dumb” questions (read: beginner questions), and then cringed at them later once we knew better. But instead of offering guidance to developers at different stages of the learning curve, Stack Overflow often responded with classics like:

“Duplicate of [completely unrelated question with 0 answers and one downvote].”

“I’m trying to use X in Y and I’m getting error Z. What am I doing wrong?” Answer: Why are you even using Y? That’s a terrible idea. Learn Rust.

Wow. Very helpful. Thank you for your service.

Conclusion

Did AI kill Stack Overflow? Not exactly. But it definitely changed its role.

There’s still a place for it. AI isn’t perfect. It hallucinates, fabricates, and sometimes confidently suggests solutions that can cost your team a weekend and your sanity. Stack Overflow, at its best, still provides community-vetted answers, deep dives into edge cases, and the ability to learn and share experiences with real, human peers.

So live Stack Overflow. Long live AI. Whether you’re Ctrl+C-ing from Stack Overflow or letting ChatGPT gaslight you into sudo rm -rf /, remember: the real bug was the friends we made along the way.