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Labs experiment launch: stackoverflow.ai

UPDATE - July 9, 2025

This week we’ve updated stackoverflow.ai with the following new functionality and fixes:

  • Related content suggestions are more relevant and dynamically re-ranked during conversational chat
  • Related content suggestions can now come from the Stack Exchange network, in addition to Stack Overflow
  • UX updates, improvements and fixes
  • All users now see the link on the left navigation menu, which is now “AI Assist”

Still pending release later this week:

  • Import chat history option allows for content from other LLM conversations to be imported via summary
  • Improved mobile accessibility for the chat experience
  • Built-in feedback mechanism

Many thanks to those who’ve provided feedback and shared thoughts on this post. Since the experiment now has a built-in feedback mechanism, if you are engaging with the experiment you can use that to provide feedback about your experience. General feedback remains welcome here.

Some of you asked very valid questions about who this experiment is targeting and whether this concept can be a new on-ramp into the community. The reason for this experiment is to explore the potential audience and entry path.

This experiment exists in the broader evolving landscape around LLM attribution. We acknowledge the concerns around attribution of the chat responses, and we are working to address this in the best way for the community and users.

mockup image of stackoverflow.ai

Continuing experimentation around themes of reaching and supporting technologists and smarter discovery, today (June 25, 2025), we're announcing a limited experiment on stackoverflow.ai, a new AI-powered search and discovery tool.

What is stackoverflow.ai?

We’ve experimented with AI-powered search and discovery before, so what’s different this time? Past concepts were RAG-based (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) and simply surfaced answers from Stack Overflow. The stackoverflow.ai experiment offers a model-agnostic generative AI tool, trained on knowledge from the broader web (including the Stack Exchange Network). As the user interacts with the tool, related content from Stack Overflow is displayed in the sidebar. This human-authored content from Stack Overflow is available as an entry point into the community and can help the user validate output from the genAI conversation.

The goal is to provide users with:

  • A new way to get started on Stack Overflow. The tool can help developers get unblocked instantly with answers to their technical problems, while helping them learn along the way and providing a path into the community.
  • A familiar, natural language experience that anyone who has interacted with genAI chatbots would expect, but further enriched with clear connections to trusted and verified Stack Overflow knowledge.
  • A user-friendly interface with conversational search and discovery.
  • A path, when the genAI tool isn’t providing the solution they need, to bring their question to the Stack Overflow community via the latest question asking experience, including Staging Ground.

This limited release is a first iteration to understand infrastructure viability, identify and fix bugs, assess core functionality, and gather initial feedback before considering opening it up to more testing and adding more functionality.

Additionally, this limited release will help us ensure our tools effectively detect and manage unrelated, inappropriate, or harmful content. It is important that we get this right, so if you get responses from this feature that are incorrect, harmful, or otherwise, inappropriate, please contact our team by using the "Contact" link here, selecting Trust and Safety under “What can we help you with?”, and selecting I have a concern with StackOverflow.ai.

Contact Support Dropdown Menu

What comes next?

Over the next few weeks, we will assess core functionality and gather initial feedback from the community and the randomly selected users and visitors using the feature.

Provided this early testing phase goes well, in July, we expect to add the following features and capabilities:

  • Import chat history - Developers can pick up right where they left off in another AI tool to get unstuck on stackoverflow.ai.
  • Related content suggestions from the Stack Exchange network, as well as Stack Overflow.
  • Dynamic re-ranking of the related content based on the ongoing genAI conversation.
  • The path to post a question directly to the relevant Stack Exchange site.
  • Additional ways to provide feedback and flag content on the genAI response.

This post is for bug reports and suggestions from users who have tried out the new interface, as well as for general feedback from the Meta community — how might this evolve to do more for developers, or for you?

Answer*

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11
  • 3
    They said relevant, not references though. I agree, that it isn't any better. But if they want to try and make money that way without disrupting SO, all power to them. Commented Jun 25 at 18:19
  • 48
    @M-- if they were making honest attempts at actually providing innovative solutions using our content, sure, but this isn't that. It's just straight LLM output with a secondary loose search of SO. The two aren't related at all. Google's AI summaries do a better job of attributing sources. Commented Jun 25 at 18:30
  • That's fair enough. Commented Jun 25 at 18:32
  • 24
    "it shows some SO questions on the right". "It" actually doesn't (according to itself, though), and seems to be a completely separate process (driving your point even further). Commented Jun 25 at 22:09
  • 9
    "It is no better than just using any of the existing chat tools." — No, it is in fact significantly worse. Commented Jun 26 at 14:37
  • @Adám significantly worse also isn't better Commented Jun 26 at 14:39
  • 9
    True, but that phrase is often used to mean "about on par with". I'd underscore how bad it actually is. Commented Jun 26 at 14:42
  • Do you guys believe SO search was good enough to ever use it? Why would stackoverflow.ai will be? I bet any AI with web-search function will do it better. Commented Jun 30 at 13:03
  • 1
    @Sinatr any AI trained on the entire internet and unleashed to provide answers based on that data will be better than SO site search in it's current form. however, i also believe Overflow AI Search, that htey experimented with a few years ago, was a happy middleground that was more effective at finding relevant answers than the site search as well and was kept to providing answers that exist on SO, rather than generating an answer and then trying to find relevant SO answers after the fact like stackoverflow.ai does. Commented Jun 30 at 14:26
  • @KevinB, back then I've asked Overflow AI few times and never used it since. It's bad, so bad, that you can't use it anymore (good). This company has only one great thing in their portfolio and it's not in the focus Commented Jun 30 at 15:37
  • 3
    @Sinatr Overflow AI was just a more advanced natural language search based on ML, not chatgpt, that then dumped the resulting answers into chatgpt to be summarized. For that reason, it was far better at finding relevant content that actually existed on SO. that's all i'm saying. I would generally prefer they kept the first step and dropped the summarization, and i expressed as much when that experiment was active. It was the improved search we had been asking for for a decade... with slop thrown in at the last step. Commented Jun 30 at 15:47