Over the past one and a half years, Stack Overflow has lost around 50% of its traffic. This decline is similarly reflected in site usage, with approximately a 50% decrease in the number of questions and answers, as well as the number of votes these posts receive.
The charts below show the usage represented by a moving average of 49 days.
What happened?
Half the time when I ask it for advice, ChatGPT recommends nonexistent APIs and offers examples in some Frankenstein code that uses a bit of this system and a bit of that, none of which will work. But I still find its hit rate to be no worse than Stack Overflow, and it doesn’t try to humiliate you for daring to ask.
Your follow up question should be for ChatGPT to write those APIs for you.
It depends on what sort of thing you’re asking about. More obscure languages and systems will result in hallucinated APIs more often. If it’s something like “how do I sort this list of whatever in some specific way in C#” or “can you write me a regex for such and such a task” then it’s far more often right. And even when ChatGPT gets something wrong, if you tell it the error you encountered from the code it’ll usually be good at correcting itself.
I find that if it gets it wrong in the first place, its corrections are often equally wrong. I guess this indicates that I’ve strayed into an area where its training data is not of good quality.