Guest: Prashanth Chandrasekar (LinkedIn)
Company: Stack Overflow (Twitter)
Show: Let’s Talk

Stack Overflow wants to help developers leverage generative AI and do so with the confidence that they will be able to document and understand the provenance and context of the code being generated.

In this episode of TFiR: Let’s Talk, Stack Overflow CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar shares his insights on how he has seen the evolution of developer culture and how Stack Overflow continues to help the developer community as new technologies continue to emerge.

Current trends in the market:

• The generative AI era has started, which is also going to affect all things in software development.
• According to the 2023 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, 70% of 90,000 respondents are interested in or already using AI tools.
• Only 40% of the respondents fully trust these AI tools. As technologists and developers who build production-level applications that are mission-critical for companies, they view AI tools as black boxes. They have no idea if the code that is generated, or the information that is provided is right, wrong, or hallucinating.
• Companies are already leveraging the compounding effect of collecting data and access to very affordable compute storage and networking through cloud computing.
• The number of software developers has increased dramatically.
• There is an explosion of generative AI-enabled startups.

Impact of Generative AI:

• It is not a fad. It is a tremendous platform shift that’s going to define this next era of computing.
• It has summarizations, discoveries, and semantic search to leverage very, very large data sets, which can produce new insights and new capabilities for companies and developers to use.
• It has a set of deficiencies that should be filled by the community, such as connecting the dots, coming up with conclusions, and making decisions.
• It’s going to increase the number of software developer jobs dramatically. People with various skill levels will be able to just get on the journey of being a software developer because it’s accessible and open.
• With the rise of prompt engineering, the types of things that people will do will be different over time as they harness the power of these LLMs to produce tremendous outcomes.
• Companies will be able to unlock a lot of value as they build great experiences for their customers.
• People will have to adapt to leveraging these tools to be more effective and productive in their organizations. Otherwise, they will probably get left behind.

Stack Overflow is the well-known public platform where millions of developers and technologists come for technical knowledge sharing. It has 58 million questions and answers and a lot of historical context over the past 15 years.

Stack Overflow for Teams is a very large software-as-a-service product leveraged by 15,000 organizations to effectively share knowledge and collaborate with our platform internally. It’s effectively a private Stack Overflow for companies to use. It integrates with GitHub, Jira, Okta, Slack, Microsoft Teams. The idea is to keep the developers in their workflow and not context switching.

OverflowAI leverages generative AI in both the public Stack Overflow as well as Stack Overflow for Teams. It is the intersection of community and generative AI with Stack Overflow in the middle so developers can build highly trusted solutions. It has attribution and citations; it is highly accurate, high quality, and has a great feedback mechanism.

During the 2023 WeAreDevelopers World Congress, it was announced that OverflowAI will be:

• Providing search capabilities on the public platform. Users can have a natural language conversation with OverflowAI straight on Stack Overflow. The content is summarized, complete with citations and attribution. You can extend that conversation deeper, provide more context, even add in your code. This opens up the opportunity for people of all levels of capability to engage on Stack Overflow. (Historically, the level had to be pretty high, usually an expert.)
• Providing an entire area of AI community discussions where people can engage in generative AI topics like prompt engineering, natural language processing, etc. with subject matter experts. Because this space is moving so rapidly, Stack Overflow wants to promote learning and provide that capability.
• Providing OverflowAI Enterprise Knowledge Ingestion in the Stack Overflow for Teams. It uses existing knowledge bases in the company (e.g., Confluence, SharePoint, GitHub, Google Drive), ingest all that information into Stack Overflow for Teams instantaneously, create Q&A pairs, automatically create tag suggestions, subject matter experts, and then give the option for the customer to choose whether to ingest these or not based on the quality. This happens within minutes.
• Providing enhanced search capabilities in Stack Overflow for Teams. The generative AI answer to a natural language question is going to come from the public stack of over 58 million questions/answers, and from your Stack Overflow for Teams repository within the own company. It also brings backlinks to other repositories within the company, even outside of Stack Overflow.
• Providing OverflowAI Visual Studio Code extension, where you have the ability to surface Stack Overflow content from the public Stack Overflow and the private Stack Overflow in your IDE.
• Providing the same generative AI capabilities in the Slack interface.

This summary was written by Camille Gregory.