HACKER Q&A
📣 warrenm

Why has no one made an IDE add-on that auto queries StackOverflow?


Why has no one made an IDE add-on that auto queries StackOverflow?


  👤 toomuchtodo Accepted Answer ✓
If generative AI coding assistant models were trained on StackOverflow, they already are using that data to autocomplete via inference.

👤 krupan
How would that work? You'd type your question as a code comment maybe, and the IDE would do a Google search for you?

👤 PaulHoule
There's nothing automatic about StackOverflow.

StackOverflow suffered from the "benign neglect" variation of "enshittification" -- once they had a social game that people would play they did not attempt any kind of continuous improvement. Looking for answers involves:

1. Parsing a wordy question by a highly confused author to determine if their problem is really related to your problem.

2. Finding the accepted answer on top with 80+ upvotes and 10 comments that say "NOOOOOOOO! This is wrong!"

3. If it's Python the examples all look like

   print x
and can't be cut and pasted into your Python 3 console.

In all the quality is atrocious and I think it's a better use of your time to read the manuals over and over again until you can find answers in the manual.