Stack Overflow is leveraging the millions of questions and responses on its platform to create new AI-based capabilities that can make better use of this information and provide developers with solutions to their problems faster.
“For the last fifteen years, developers have come to Stack Overflow to get a solution to a specific problem. With the rise of Generative AI, Stack Overflow’s foundation of trusted and accurate data will be central to how technology solutions are built,” said Prashanth Chandrasekar, CEO of Stack Overflow. “There is no doubt that with widespread access to GenAI tools that code will be created more quickly, and the volume is likely to explode with code completion tools and the need for trust in their output will only increase for developers. Our goal with OverflowAI is to ensure developers are not only contributing to the foundation of what GenAI is today, they are also an integral part of building its future. Developers and technologists should take pride and ownership in knowing that community is the future of AI.”
The new features are being released under the umbrella of OverflowAI. Four of the offerings are available under its SaaS platform Stack Overflow for Teams and two can be found on the public platform.
Within Stack Overflow for Teams, teams will now be able to create their own knowledge base from existing trusted content. AI is used to create the initial tagging structure and recommend questions and answers. Then developers can go in and refine the content manually to add more value.
“In essence, the AI efficiently bootstraps your Stack Overflow community, allowing you to take advantage of key documents in repositories that are not being discovered and reused. This frees up developers to focus on adding value by curating and refining the content to validate accuracy,” Chandrasekar wrote in a blog post.
There is also now an improved search that parses data from Stack Overflow for Teams, Stack Overflow, and other sources such as Confluence and GitHub.
Stack Overflow for Teams also received new integrations with Visual Studio Code and Slack. A new Visual Studio Code extension will allow developers to access content from Stack Overflow while in the IDE so that they can quickly get information that will enable them to solve problems better. Within Slack, a new chatbot called StackPlusOne collects and presents generated solutions to problems without the developer having to exit Slack.
On the public Stack Overflow platform, developers will get access to OverflowAI Search, which is a generative AI-based search feature. According to the company, this feature will provide “instant, trustworthy, and accurate solutions to problems” and all responses can be cited properly, as they are generated from over 58 million existing responses on Stack Overflow. Developers will be able to then further refine their queries if necessary to get the answers they are looking for.
“Our goal here is to create a conversational, human-centered search. We want to make it possible for public platform users to receive instant, trust-worthy, and accurate solutions to problems using conversational search powered by GenAI,” Chandrasekar wrote.
The company also announced a new Stack Exchange based specifically on generative AI. GenAI Stack Exhange will focus on sharing knowledge around writing prompts for generative AI and staying on top of the latest advancements. Along with this, the company’s Natural Language Processing (NLP) Collective now includes a Discussions space for debating approaches, exploring different strategies for implementation, and sharing perspectives.
