What is the point of a software Q&A site anyway, why not just read the docs?
In my experience, Q&A is useful because it summarises and consolidates disparate information into a concise response to a prompt (sorry, I mean to a Question!) which is... exactly what a chat AI does.
Isn’t chat AI an existential threat to SO, even if AI is banned there?
Certainly I find chat AI better in many cases, and if I don’t like the answers, just going to the docs is the next step, not a generic Google search with SO in the SERP.
> In my experience, Q&A is useful because it summarises and consolidates disparate information into a concise response to a prompt (sorry, I mean to a Question!) which is... exactly what a chat AI does
There is knowledge you will never find in documentation. 50% of places where SO has been helpful to me are not "consolidating documentation". They are solutions to obscure bugs, Useful APIs which are not documented with any example, and low-level logic / high-level design solutions.
What is the point of a software Q&A site anyway, why not just read the docs?
In my experience, Q&A is useful because it summarises and consolidates disparate information into a concise response to a prompt (sorry, I mean to a Question!) which is... exactly what a chat AI does.
Isn’t chat AI an existential threat to SO, even if AI is banned there?
Certainly I find chat AI better in many cases, and if I don’t like the answers, just going to the docs is the next step, not a generic Google search with SO in the SERP.