Serious question here. LLMs trained their data off SO. Developers now ask LLMs for solutions instead of SO. New technology comes out that LLMs don’t have indexed. Where will LLMs get their data to train on for new technologies? You can’t exactly feed it a manual and expect it to extrapolate or understand (for that matter “what manual).
this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2026
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Yes, that is the major problem with LLMs in general. There is no solution aside from "train on another different source (like Reddit)", but then we rinse & repeat.
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Worrying that forums will dissappear too.
The only answer you'll get are SKUM sponsored bullshit with embedded ads.
Remember before they destroyed the internet? Good times.
A product I use still has an old school forum. The mods asked a while back whether to switch to Discord, and the responses were a resounding “NO”. It’s nice to have discussions organized by topics with descriptive titles that are indexed by search engines and are self-hosted by each organization instead of being centrally owned and controlled.
I'm happy to see a bit of a renaissance of forums in the last few years. Quite a few open source projects now run forums built on the Discourse engine (open-source, can be self-hosted for free). I was kinda sceptical at first, they look so different from the BBCode forums I was used to, but over time came to appreciate the features that drag the forum format into the 21st century.
I hope an increasing number of projects come to realise the drawbacks of Discord, namely that you keep years' worth of information on someone else's centralised platform, and it's very difficult to find past information even for members of the server, and impossible from the outside. I look at a handful of Discord channels daily, but had to mute some because users keep asking the same questions every two days...
I think a lot of good information is being scrubbed or controlled and, very soon, what was once free, you will be charged for.
A SO paywall would be ironic, as one of the main reasons for its creation was that experts(-)exchange was paywalled and annoying
It's worth to mention that the StackOverflow survey referenced does not include many countries with also great/genius developers, including Belarus, Russia, China, Iran...
There are related cases raised on Meta scopes: Developer Survey 2025 is, apparently, region blocked...
Apparently, while I've being employed in security as software engineer for at least 19 years now, I've never ever considered these trendy LLM/"AI" all serious, and still do not.
Sorry, I have literally no interest in all of it that makes you dependent on it, atrophies mind, degrades research and social skills, and negates self-confidencen with respect to other authors, their work, and attributions. Nor any of my colleagues in military and those I know better in person.
Constant research, general IDEs like JetBrains's, IDA Pro, Sublime Text, VS Code, etc. backed by forums, chats, and Communities, is absolutely enough for the accountable and fun work in our teams, who manage to keep in adequate deadlines.
Nor will use any LLM in my work, art, or research... I prefer people, communication, discoveries, effort, creativity, and human art...
I just disable it everywhere possible, and will do all my life. The close case to my environment was VS Code, and hopefully there's no reason to build it from source since they still leave built-in options to disable it: https://stackoverflow.com/a/79534407/5113030 (How can I disable GitHub Copilot in VS Code?...)
Isn't it just inadequate to not think and develop your mind, and let alone pass control of your environment to a yet another model or "advanced T9" of unknown source of unknown iteration.
In pentesting, random black-box IO, medicine experimental unverified intel, log data approximation why not? But in environment control, education, art or programming, fine art... No, never ^^
Meanwhile... so freaking, incredibly many developers, artists are left without attribution, respect, gratitude...
So many people atrophy their skils for learning, contribution, researching, accumulation, self-organization...
So much human precious time is wasted...
So much gets devalued...
The time will show... and just a few actually accountable will recover only, probably...
This is so heartache... sorrowful...
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Good. That site has been a toxic hole in the ground for a decade or more.
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Who is going to ask there to be harresed
What? People would rather have their balls licked by AI rather than have some neckbeard moderator change the entire language of their question and not answer shit? Fuck SO. That shit was so ass to interact with.
Every question has been answered, pack it up boys.