This week, I learned:

  • Connected Papers shows papers similar to each other based on co-citation and bibliographic coupling for ~50,000 papers.
  • Notes from a fireside chat with Prashanth Chandrasekar, CEO, StackOverflow, and the StackOverflow team
    • There’s a signal that software demand is growing in 2024. Many more students took the StackOverflow survey in 2024. So more students (or other professionals) are shifting into / starting to learn software development.
    • The AI Index is a good resource for AI trends.
    • Experts are better able to use AI for writing code. Less experienced developers are more likely to use AI for code reviews, project planning, etc.
    • There’s a 5% decline in favorability for AI tools compared to 2023, maybe due to disappointing results.
    • Pilot groups working on AI are 25-30% more productive. They’re the most enthusiastic. For the rest of the company, it drops off to 5-10%
      • #LEARNING Benefit comes from NEW people becoming programmers, not existing ones getting more effective?
    • StackOverflow wants to be where the developer is.
      • The programmer workflow was: Google -> StackOverflow -> GitHub.
      • Now it’s changing to ChatGPT / Cursor -> GitHub.
      • StackOverflow has a partnership with OpenAI and working on a plugin. Same with Google’s Duet AI, GitHub Copilot, many others. They’ll link to StackOverflow.
    • StackOverflow is driving integration actively through an enterprise Overflow API
    • Q: What tech have you seen blaze through the ranks?
      • Prashanth: Abstraction wins. Stuff that abstracts away things well and more wins. This includes Gen AI.
      • Erin Yepis: Rust (from 3% to 12%). AWS has steady growth.
      • Erin Yapis: I have a time series spreadsheet that I’ll publish.
    • Q: What technologies are unusually tightly coupled?
      • Prashanth: AWS & Google Cloud are tightly coupled.
    • Q: We have an engagement problem. Might be India-specific. What are low-effort high-return mechanisms to increase engagement.
      • Eric Woodring: Rather than a static web page, integrate it using the API. #TODO
      • Ben Marconi: Use LLMs to write post mortems and push to StackOverflow. #TODO
      • Eric Woodring: “Hydrating” the community helps.
        • We take repeat questions on Teams / Slack and seed them using LLMs.
        • We integrate with the API to auto-add Q&A.
        • Transform documentation into Q&A. Potentially UPDATE existing Q&A if it’s wrong.
    • Q: What unexpected lessons about developer behavior have you learned while running StackOverflow?
      • Prashanth: We didn’t expect developers moving away from Google. Now it moved to the IDE.
    • Q: What are you learning about developer learning behavior?
      • Ben Marconi: Generating LLM-based onboarding documents.
      • Using StackOverflow for Teams to identify who the experts are to contact for specific topics.
    • Q: Are you thinking about leveraging Stack Overflow’s knowledge base for personalized or interactive learning experiences? How?
      • Prashanth: Traditionally, people use StackOveflow for productivity, learning, and flexibility (i.e. to ask/answer questions asynchronously without breaking their flow). So yeah, learning is important for us. (Duh!)
    • Q: Could Stack Overflow’s interactions help evaluate the accuracy and relevance of LLM-generated code? Or provide potential metrics on quality?
      • Prashanth: LLM accuracy improves by ~30%. Upvotes / downvotes are reinforcement learning (RL) in steroids, so that helps.
    • Q: What are your thoughts on reliance on LLMs potentially deskill-ing developers?
      • Prashanth: A real issue for junior developers, not for senior ones.
      • They’ll come across as knowledgeable.
      • Make internal evaluations and interviews more rigorous.
    • Anand’s requests for action:
      • Could I get a copy of Erin’s spreadsheet? Vivek Narayanan will follow-up.
      • Could you help me learn more about hydration? Nick Madison will set up a meeting with customer success group.
  • I switched to fish shell mainly because:
    • Autocomplete and tab completion works perfectly, out-of-box.
    • Syntax highlighting is beautiful
    • Great multi-line editing
  • To format with VS Code Ruff, you need to point the ruff.interpreter setting to a Python interpreter. You can’t run the ruff server without Python, even though ruff itself doesn’t need Python.
  • cd checks all paths specified in CDPATH for the directory name and changes to the first match. That’s pretty convenient!
  • Flipper Zero is now on my list of “To Buy” tools. It has a variety of hardware devices including NFC, RFID, Bluetooth, Infrared, etc. and is great to reverse engineer or hack devices.