For years, if you had questions about C pointers, JavaScript operators, or how inheritance works in Python, your first destination was Stack Overflow. However, things have changed.
Some observers claim that Stack Overflow has lost around 35% of its traffic over the past year and a half. In an attempt to raise the bar, Stack Overflow adds artificial intelligence (AI) to its offers: OverflowAI.
Knowledge directly in IDEs
The company’s ambitious roadmap includes integrating generative AI into its public platform, Stack Overflow for Teams, and into new products. The goal is to bring the wealth of knowledge from over 58 million community questions and answers directly into developer workspaces.
This process will happen by integrating OpenflowAI into the IDE through an extension in Visual Studio Code. This extension will pull validated content from the public platform and instances of Stack Overflow for Teams.
It will provide a personalized summary of how programmers can solve problems, allow them to drill down if needed, and document new learnings and solutions. The real advantage of OverflowAI is to provide the information without the developer having to leave their IDE.
Of course, other similar extensions, like GitHub CoPilot, already exist. But in an interview, Prashanth Chandrasekar, CEO of Stack Overflow, sees Copilot as a complementary solution.
OpenflowAI complementary to Copilot
“Copilot would be a complementary solution. With OverflowAI, we can verify, validate, attribute and confirm the accuracy and reliability of the Stack Overflow community and its more than 58 million questions and answers.”
“One of the biggest barriers to AI adoption is trust in the accuracy of AI-generated content. Stack Overflow’s annual survey of 90,000 coders recently found that 77% of developers are supportive of AI tools, but only 42% trust the accuracy of these tools OverflowAI was developed with the community at its heart and with a focus on data and content accuracy generated by AI,” adds Prashanth Chandrasekar.
Behind the scenes, OverflowAI has updated its platform’s search capabilities. Until now, Stack Overflow relied on lexical search, which matches users with questions and answers based on provided keywords.
Introduction of semantic search
However, the introduction of semantic search, based on a vector database, should improve user queries.
Semantic vector search is based on words that are assigned a numerical value by machine learning (ML). Large language models, such as Generative Pre-trained Transformer 4 (GPT-4), use these values to determine the relationship between words. It’s this approach that powers ChatGPT and many other generative AI chatbots. Today, Slack Overflow also uses this approach.
Stack Overflow also introduces GenAI Stack Exchange, a community centered on sharing knowledge about AI tools, and Stack Overflow’s Natural Language Processing (NLP) Collective, which includes a new feature called Discussions for discussing technical AI approaches and of ML, and to share points of view.