That's a pretty cool little sim.

As someone who rarely programs anything, and who hasn’t touched assembly for over 40 years, that was a great read and a fascinating (math) journey.

I can say with confidence this is all 100% correct and also that as an IC you're damned if you do and damned if you don't.

Don't use AI and your code output isn't high enough, you're flagged for underperformance and PIP'd unless you get onboard.

Use AI and you rapidly deskill. And if you're a relative newcomer to the industry you never learn in the first place.

At this point all I can say is: ride it out by day. Practice the old fashioned way by night. Cuz either we have to keep our heads down until this blows over, or we move with times and accept that software development as we knew it is gone for good.

Maybe it was all the assholes.

IMO this just never made sense with how fast software evolves. There are now very often different and better solutions available using more recent features that didn't exist 10 years ago.

they got what they wanted

Thanks for the reminder! I probably knew that at one point, but with so many Free Software/Culture organizations lighting themselves on fire over the past year or so, they start to all blur together...

I dedicated my degree to all the random Indians who had STEM related topics on youtube.

This is the most relatable thing I've read all week. No way in hell I would have graduated had they not dragged me by my feet screaming through the math courses. For all of YouTube's faults, those videos are true gems.

I also ended up relying quite a bit on random old lectures from professors who can actually teach. No idea what schools they were lecturing at, but I wish the one I was at had more professors like them. Instead, they were all research professors who were being forced to lecture (or grad students in the same boat).

There's a kiwix archive of it out there somewhere.

The graph shows me that Chatgpt had almost nothing to do with the stagnation and decline.

1. Looking answer for A.
2. Find stack overflow post about it
3. “This is a dublicate”
4. Link goes to question with answer to B.
5. And B while being close to A is not A.

Peak stack overflow experience.

Didn't Stack Overflow sell their own data to AI companies before the crash?

Or worded more positively: Stack Overflow is closer to being complete.

I wouldn't say "left"; she was fired for requesting clarification (thus causing the biggest resignation wave ever). I also recommend Codidact for asking new questions!

Graduated summa cum laude...no thanks to them. I dedicated my degree to all the random Indians who had STEM related topics on youtube. Those guys dragged my ass throguh college for sure.

I forget whether it's through the data page or somewhere else, but I gather that they've always made it pretty straightforward to grab the questions/answers/comments. For a while, web searches were a mess, because of all the fly-by-night outfits syndicating all conversations with SEO trickery to sell ad space.

It needs more traffic (and that'll require better servers and more moderation with training to make sure that it doesn't follow the same arc) to become a standard place to go, but I've become fond of Codidact. If I remember correctly, the founder left Stack during one of their bigger moderation blow-ups.

Might be worth a preservation effort.

This is the issue.

It wanted to be a repository of knowledge. People used it like a forum. Instead of capitalizing on that disconnect by having a place for those questions they just shut it down, which alienated many people.

A popular book doesn't receive new pages either.

Maybe Stack Overflow is "complete" or "stable"? :)

It was around 2017 my questions just stopped getting answers. Even if it wasn't closed, I'd just get nothing. Eventually gave up asking.

I asked a handful of questions there and allways got really nice answers. Does it matter that people need less help these days?

Seems good to me that AI can take care of the easy questions.

Well... were they correct? Did you graduate?

What made it inevitable in your opinion?