The tides are shifting in the world of developer communities as a new generation of artificial intelligence-powered chatbots rise in popularity. According to SimilarWeb, developers are turning to AI chatbots like GitHub CoPilot and OpenAI’s ChatGPT for advice and assistance, leaving popular message boards like Stack Overflow behind.
As of the beginning of 2022, traffic to Stack Overflow’s community website has been on a steady decline, losing its reputation as the go-to source for developers seeking answers to challenging coding problems. While the reason for the decline is not entirely clear, experts speculate that the introduction of the CoPilot coding assistant from Microsoft’s GitHub business may be to blame.
CoPilot is built on top of OpenAI’s large language model, which processes both human and programming languages. With a plugin to the widely used Microsoft Visual Studio Code, developers can now have CoPilot write entire functions on their behalf, thus eliminating the need to search for answers on Stack Overflow itself.
Meanwhile, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which launched at the end of November 2021, has become the world’s hottest digital property in a very short time, even surpassing Microsoft’s Bing search engine for worldwide traffic. In March alone, the website attracted 1.6 billion visits, while over 920.7 million visits were recorded in the first half of April.
GitHub, which houses CoPilot, has also been experiencing strong growth, with traffic to its website up 26.4% year-over-year in March, totaling 524 million visits. This figure does not necessarily reflect the use of CoPilot, which typically operates within an editor like Visual Studio Code, though it does include people visiting the website to obtain a subscription to the service. Furthermore, visits to the GitHub CoPilot free trial signup page rose by more than three times from February to March, exceeding 800,000.
The impact of these new AI-powered chatbots is clear: developers are increasingly choosing them over traditional message boards and other forums. While chatbots like CoPilot still have limitations, especially when it comes to understanding a user’s exact needs, they are evolving rapidly and becoming more intuitive and sophisticated.
The rise of these AI chatbots also has significant implications for the future of software development. For instance, as chatbots continue to become more intelligent, developers may begin to rely on them to do more than just write code snippets and functions; they could advise developers on entire software architectures and design decisions as well.
At the same time, it is worth recognizing that relying solely on AI chatbots could limit the type of collaboration and communication that comes from using message boards and other online communities. After all, message boards can offer nuanced answers, explanations, and ideas that are often difficult for chatbots to provide in the same way.
In conclusion, the rising popularity of AI chatbots such as CoPilot and ChatGPT signals a shift in how developers approach coding challenges. While traditional message boards like Stack Overflow still have value, AI chatbots are becoming increasingly sophisticated and capable, offering speedy and accurate solutions to complex problems. The ultimate question for developers to consider is whether they want to rely entirely on AI-powered chatbots or if they wish to combine these tools with traditional online communities to achieve the best possible results.
