Stack Overflow users don’t trust AI. They’re using it anyway
Today, I’m talking with Prashanth Chandrasekar, who is the CEO of Stack Overflow. I last had Prashanth on the show in 2022, one month before ChatGPT launched. While the generative AI boom had tons of impact on all sorts of companies, it immediately upended everything about Stack Overflow in an existential way. Stack Overflow, if you’re not familiar with it, is the question and answer forum for developers writing code. Before the AI explosion, it was a thriving community where developers asked for and received help with complicated programming problems. But if there’s one thing AI is good at, it’s helping developers write code — and not just write code, but develop entire working apps. On top of that, Stack Overflow’s forums themselves became flooded with AI-generated answers, bringing down the quality of the community as a whole. You’ll hear Prashanth explain that it was clear more or less from the jump how big a deal ChatGPT was going to be, and his response was pure Decoder bait. He ...
