Stack Overflow 'Evolves', Previewing AI-Powered Answers and Chat Followups

"Stack Overflow is adding artificial intelligence to its offerings," reports ZDNet (which notes traffic to the Q&A site has dropped 5% in the last year). So in a video, Stack Overflow's CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar says that search and question-asking "will evolve to provide you with instant summarized solutions with citations to sources, aggregated by generative AI - plus the option to ask follow-up questions in a chat-like format." The New Stack provides some context:As computer scientist Santiago Valdarrama remarked in a tweet, "I don't remember the last time I visited Stack Overflow. Why would I when tools like Copilot and ChatGPT answer my questions faster without making me feel bad for asking?" It's a problem Stack Overflow CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar acknowledges because, well, he encountered it too. "When I first started using Stack Overflow, I remember my first experience was quite harsh, because I basically asked a fairly simple question, but the standard on the website is pretty high," Chandrasekar told The New Stack. "When ChatGPT came out, it was a lot easier for people to go and ask ChatGPT without anybody watching...." But what may be of more interest to developers is that Stack Overflow is now offering an IDE (integrated development environment) extension for Visual Studio Code that will be powered by OverflowAI. This means that coders will be able to ask a conversational interface a question and find solutions from within the IDE. Stack Overflow also is launching a GenAI Stack Exchange, where the community can post and share knowledge on prompt engineering, getting the most out of AI and similar topics. And they're integrating it into other workflows as well. "Of course, AI isn't replacing humans any time soon," CEO Chandrasekar says in the video. "But it can help you draft a question to pose to our community..." Signups for the OverflowAI preview are available now. "With your help, we'll be putting AI to work," CEO Chandrasekar says in the video.

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