Comment by socalgal2

ChatGPT and Gemini literally only know the answer because they read StackOverflow. Stack Overflow only exists because they have visitors.

What do you think will happen when everyone is using the AI tools to answer their questions? We'll be back in the world of Encyclopedias, in which central authorities spent large amounts of money manually collecting information and publishing it. And then they spent a good amount of time finding ways to sell that information to us, which was only fair because they spent all that time collating it. The internet pretty much destroyed that business model, and in some sense the AI "revolution" is trying to bring it back.

Also, he's specifically talking about having a coding tool write the code for you, he's not talking about using an AI tool to answer a question, so that you can go ahead and write the code yourself. These are different things, and he is treating them differently.

To add, another experience I had. I was using an API I'm not that familiar with. My program was crashing. Looking at the stack trace I didn't see why. Maybe if I had many months experience with this API it would be obvious but it certainly wasn't to me. For fun I just copy and pasted the stack trace into Gemini. ~60 frames worth of C++. It immediately pointed out the likely cause given the API I was using. I fixed the bug with a 2 line change once I had that clue from the AI. That seems pretty useful to me. I'm not sure how long it would have taken me to find it otherwise since, as I said, I'm not that familiar with that API.

One of the many ways that search got worse over time was the promotion of blog spam over actual documentation. Generally, I would rather have good API documentation or a user guide that leads me through the problem so that next time I know how to help myself. Reading through good API documentation often also educates you about the overall design and associated functionality that you may need to use later. Reading the manual for technology that you will be regularly using is generally quite profitable.

Sometimes, a function doesn't work as advertised or you need to do something tricky, you get a weird error message, etc. For those things, stackoverflow could be great if you could find someone who had a similar problem. But the tutorial level examples on most blogs might solve the immediate problem without actually improving your education.

It would be similar to someone solving your homework problems for you. Sure you finished your homework, but that wasn't really learning. From this perspective, ChatGPT isn't helping you learn.

For anything non-trivial you have to verify the results.

I disabled AI autocomplete and cannot understand how people can use it. It was mostly an extra key press on backspace for me.

That said, learning new languages is possible without searching anything. With a local model, you can do that offline and have a vast library of knowledge at hand.

The Gemini results integrated in Google are very bad as well.

I don't see the main problem to be people just lazily asking AI for how to use the toilet, but that real knowledge bases like stack overflow and similar will vanish because of lacking participation.

It's perfect for small boilerplate utilities. If I need a browser extension/tampermonkey script, I can get up and running quickly without having to read docs/write manifests. These are small projects where without AI, I wouldn't have bothered to even start.

At its least, AI can be extremely useful for autocompleting simple code logic or automatically finding replacements when I'm copying code/config and making small changes.

> Getting answers to those question is learning, regardless of where the answer comes from.

Sort of. The process of working through the question is what drives learning. If you just receive the answer with zero effort, you are explicitly bypassing the brain's learning mechanism.

There's huge difference between your workflow and fully Agentic AIs though.

Asking an AI for the answer in the way you describe isn't exactly zero effort. You need to formulate the question and mold the prompt to get your response, and integrate the response back into the project. And in doing so you're learning! So YOUR workflow has learning built in, because you actually use your brain before and after the prompt.

But not so with vibe coding and Agentic LLMs. When you hit submit and get the tokens automatically dumped into your files, there is no learning happening. Considering AI agents are effectively trying to remove any pre-work (ie automating prompt eng) and post-work (ie automating debugging, integrating), we can see Agentic AI as explicitly anti-learning.

Here's my recent vibe coding anecdote to back this up. I was working on an app for an e-ink tablet dashboard and the tech stack of least resistance was C++ with QT SDK and their QML markup language with embedded javascript. Yikes, lots of unfamiliar tech. So I tossed the entire problem at Claude and vibe coded my way to a working application. It works! But could I write a C++/QT/QML app again today - absolutely not. I learned almost nothing. But I got working software!

I sort of disagree with this argument in TFA, as you say, though the rest of the article highlights a limitation. If I'm unfamiliar with the API, I can't judge whether the answer is good.

There is a sweet spot of situations I know well enough to judge a solution quickly, but not well enough to write code quickly, but that's a rather narrow case.

I love leaning new things. With ai I am learning more and faster.

I used to be on the Microsoft stack for decades. Windows, Hyper-V, .NET, SQL Server ... .

Got tired of MS's licensing BS and I made the switch.

This meant learning Proxmox, Linux, Pangolin, UV, Python, JS, Bootstrap, NGinx, Plausible, SQLite, Postgress ...

Not all of these were completely new, but I had never dove in seriously.

Without AI, this would have been a long and daunting project. AI made this so much smoother. It never tires of my very basic questions.

It does not always answer 100% correct the first time (tip: paste in the docs of specific version of the thing you are trying to figure out as it sometimes has out-of-date or mixed version knowledge), but most often can be nudged and prodded to a very helpfull result.

AI is just an undeniably superior teacher than Google or Stack Overflow ever was. You still do the learning, but the AI is great in getting you to learn.

For one-offs, sure! Go for it. For production/things you will have to manage long-term I would recommend learning some of the space given the output of AI and your capability to surpass that pretty quickly.

I trust chatgpt and gemini a lot less than stackoverflow. On stackoverflow I can see the context that the answer to the original question was given in. AI does not do this. I've asked chatgpt questions about cmake for instance that it got subtly wrong, if I had not noticed this it would have cost me aa lot of time.

So AI is basically best as a search engine.

And ChatGPT never closes your question without answer because it (falsely) thinks it's a duplicate of a different question from 13 years ago

I think the main issue here is trust. When you google something you develop a sense for bullshit so you can "feel" the sources and weigh them accordingly. Using a chat bot, this bias doesn't hold, so you don't know what is just SEO bullshit reiterated in sweet words and what's not.