Stack Overflow launches AI Assist chatbot for developers – News

Stack Exchange Inc., the company behind the leading developer resource Stack Overflow, today announced the public launch of its new AI Assist feature.

The company says it provides users with access to a ChatGPT-like conversational experience that will answer coding-related questions with unprecedented accuracy. Unlike other general-purpose artificial intelligence chatbots, Stack Overflow’s AI Assist has been designed to prioritize trusted, community verified knowledge ahead of any other sources, meaning that the answers it generates will be far more useful to developers, the company said.

Stack Overflow is one of the most popular web resources for developers. It operates a question-and-answer forum similar to Quora or Reddit, allowing developers to ask questions about programming topics and receive answers from their peers. The platform was founded in 2008 and has become a vital resource for coders seeking help, advice and knowledge.

The AI Assist tool was launched in preview earlier this year as a way for developers to search the extensive knowledge base acquired by Stack Overflow over the years and obtain the answers they need instantly. During the beta phase, more than 250,000 programmers globally used the chatbot for tasks such as understanding error messages, debugging code, comparing libraries and architecting applications.

Following that testing period, AI Assist has now been upgraded with a “hybrid RAG+LLM” approach that combines its powerful large language model with advanced retrieval-augmented generation to pull the most relevant information from its archives and provide transparent attribution.

The company said AI Assist will always prioritize its own content when searching for answers. So when a user enters a query, it will first search through Stack Overflow and its Stack Exchange communities to find the most relevant answers that have been verified by community members.

It will also check third-party sources when it can’t find the answers on its own platforms, but its own knowledge base will always be the primary source of information. For each response, AI Assist will provide a summary of the top community results with clear attribution to the original content creator and a link to their post, in line with its commitment to honoring its community member’s contributions.

Stack Overflow Chief Product and Technology Officer Jody Bailey stressed this attribution is vitally important. “We’re not just doing AI the ‘right way,’ we’re signaling to the entire industry that humans creating knowledge must be recognized and verified for the betterment of the tech landscape and the world at large,” he said.

To further enhance accuracy, Stack Overflow has also created an AI agent that performs the role of “answer auditor.” It’s tasked with analyzing the user’s question and the community-based summary for comprehensiveness and correctness, and will supplement the response it provides when clarity is required, the company explained. In cases where no community content can be found to answer a user’s query, the AI agent will take over and respond by itself, citing third-party sources in order to prevent “dead-end” experiences.

According to Stack Overflow, the main goal of AI Assist is to help its community members keep up to date with all of the latest changes in the rapidly-evolving coding world. Because it’s constantly scanning the Stack Overflow forums, it has access to all of the latest questions and responses and the freshest knowledge on the newest trends affecting programmers. As a result, the answers it provides will never be out of date, the company said.

To further ensure AI Assist’s relevance, Stack Overflow gives users the opportunity to discuss the answers it provides with the rest of its community, so they can verify its AI-generated responses to more complex topics and vague concepts. That’s important, Stack Overflow said, because its own LLM leaderboards demonstrate how LLMs will quickly fall behind if they aren’t continuously trained and updated on the latest knowledge from its forums.

Bailey said AI Assist gives developers the chatbot-style search and discovery experience that many are already familiar with. “We are aiming to serve the broader needs of all technologists while still supporting our larger mission to cultivate community, power learning and unlock growth,” he explained.

Image: Stack Overflow