In 2013 or maybe it was 2014 I was tasked with building a couple of things for our Sharepoint 2010 that ran our intranet. I’m a programmer but it was pretty far

In 2013 or maybe it was 2014 I was tasked with building a couple of things for our Sharepoint 2010 that ran our intranet. I’m a programmer but it was pretty far out of my area of expertise and it was hard to find anything documentation related, probably because Sharepoint 2013 had been released. Anyway, I made things work by doing a lot of google programming, of which a lot led me to SO. Most of it was build with JavaScript but I still needed to figure out how to work with Sharepoint APIs and Lists. Fast forward to 2023 and I’m tasked with working with our current Sharepoint. It’s still far out of my comfort zone, but the Microsoft documentation is on point and it turns out to be a fairly trivial task to engage with the APIs. This story isn’t really unique to Sharepoint, and while obviously very anecdotal, these days it’s very rare that your average blog spam or SO answers are more helpful to me than official documentation, and often the official GitHub code examples. Now I’m more experienced today than I was in 2013 so that helps as well, but for the most part, I think the key reduction for my personal google programming has been how much better we as software developers have become at documenting our tools. So in 2023 I almost never visit SO, not because of GPT but because the people who write frameworks also supply you with documentation and implementation examples. Again anecdotal, but I do use GPT quite a bit. Though rarely to help me figure something out. It writes my documentation, unless the code is very secret. It sometimes writes some basic code like auto-generating a docker file or basic API classes. Things that aren’t in competition with SO. I’m sure it’ll take over the role of SO for some parts, but to me personally, it seems far more likely that SO’s decline is linked to a range of other challenges as well.