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

by warrenm on 5/7/25, 1:37 PM with 4 comments

• by toomuchtodo on 5/7/25, 1:40 PM

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

• by krupan on 5/7/25, 2:07 PM

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

• by PaulHoule on 5/7/25, 1:53 PM

  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.