The silver lining of LLMs impact on Stack Overflow may be that the platform focuses on facilitating the deeper type of problem solving you describe. My experience with Stack Overflow over the years has been mixed. Frequently users misunderstand the question, threads take weeks or months to resolve, users are called incompetent by frustrated experts, answers are indecipherable to a non expert, and sometimes toxic. ChatGPT frequently outperforms these weakpoints.

If they embrace a chatGPT interface as a first line of defense for users questions, it may improve the quality of real questions, reduce repetition, and filter through actually good and compelling questions. LLMs still need systems that encourage high quality data generation from humans to improve its model. I would like to imagine a world where there is a win-win for AI and the website we've relied on so much over the years.