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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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  • 80
    "even marketing SO/SE as one of the last remaining bastions of genuine human interactions" YES! in an age with so much AI slop, SO is one of the few places with genuine human-tested and explained answers out there Commented Jun 26 at 0:33
  • 1
    "How do I explain the Theory of Relativity to a 5 year old kid?" works too.... Commented Jun 26 at 8:59
  • 6
    @ꓢPArcheon I asked it to explain 5 year old kids so that they could be understood by Albert Einstein. I didn't quite get all the physics references though. "Think of a 5-year-old as a particle in a state of quantum superposition". Hmm. Commented Jun 26 at 11:31
  • 12
    There are some decent points here but the chess game is just noise and by taking up a lot of vertical space it distracts from other posts for no purpose. Commented Jun 26 at 14:56
  • 17
    @N.Virgo the chess game serves to demonstrate how SE hasn't learned anything since the last time they tried to make an AI feature. It also gives a clear demonstration that the filters/jailbreak preventions/safeguards are a joke, and that it's possible to pull off some silly shenanigans with the tool, further proving that stackoverflow.ai isn't a good fit as a SE/SO product. Commented Jun 26 at 15:01
  • 8
    @lyxal I don't see what including the game in the post achieves that just saying "I got it to play chess with me" doesn't. It's vaguely amusing that LLMs are bad at chess but we've all seen it before. Commented Jun 26 at 15:03
  • 10
    @N.Virgo it demonstrates the process and results to show that it wasn't a fluke/one off. Plus it adds a little bit of fun to the answer, and serves as a callback to the last time I did this Commented Jun 26 at 15:04
  • 11
    Yes, but that fun is distracting from more serious points in other answers below. Commented Jun 26 at 15:05
  • 4
    @N.Virgo people are free to scroll past the gif down to the other points in this answer, and down to other answers as well Commented Jun 26 at 15:09
  • 1
    It is said that Claude "knows that it doesn't know" an answer which would be a useful feature to have. Commented Jun 26 at 15:09
  • 6
    I'm just explaining the reason for my downvote. Others can do the same or not, it's up to them. I think this answer could be one screen's worth instead of 10 and that it would be less antisocial and more valuable if it was. Commented Jun 26 at 15:11
  • 2
    Regarding the cake example, does it ever return related questions from network sites at all or only from SO? Commented Jun 27 at 18:10
  • 3
    I really wish people would pay more attention to this. Security features with LFMs are a joke at the moment because they are not rule-based, so they will "ignore" parts of their prompts under many circumstances, as suggested by recent disconcerting experiments involving inputs along the lines of "would you kill someone to achieve your goals?" Using them for anything critical is a disaster waiting to happen, and whatever they are using here—which is just a wrapper over other models—will have the exact same problems they will. Commented Jun 27 at 22:24
  • 9
    @Bobson you're absolutely right that they'd fall under topics on the wider network. However this raises a more important question - why have restrictions at all? SE covers a rather broad range of topics, to the point where I'd argue any restrictions become mostly meaningless. And at that point, the question becomes "why should I use stackoverflow.ai over ChatGPT or Claude, when it's not a new model, doesn't provide any new functionality, and occasionally blocks my prompts for not being relevant?". I do not think there's an answer for that. Commented Jun 29 at 12:28
  • 4
    Here is an additional illustration to go with the post i.programmerhumor.io/2025/03/… Commented Jun 30 at 14:46