Stack Overflow releases new AI search and plugin for VSC

Stack Overflow will integrate its own AI into its website and services. OverflowAI will include a new search function and Stack Overflow integrations for Teams and Slack. The company also comes with its own integration for Visual Studio Code.

Stack Overflow calls that new roadmap OverflowAI. The platform announced some time ago that it wanted to do much more with artificial intelligence on its platform, but now provides concrete examples of this during its own developer conference. One of the main additions to the roadmap is a new AI-powered search function. The company is releasing a closed alpha build of a semantic search function. That should be an improvement on the current search function, which only lexical works. Stack Overflow does not provide details, but says it is working with AI company GenAI to enable search terms via natural speech. That AI is trained on the content of Stack Overflow itself.

The same kind of improved search function will be released for integrations in apps such as Teams. The Stack Overflow for Teams integration will also include a chatbot that can be integrated into Slack. The company is also working on an ide that can be loaded into Visual Studio Code as an extension. This also includes the AI ​​search function, so that users can ask for answers directly. According to the platform, most users use VSC for programming and therefore it does not want to create a standalone IDE. The ide extension can be linked to Teams so that users can also collaborate.

Stack Overflow is one of the platforms hit hardest by the rapid rise of generative AI. According to analysts such as Similarweb the number of visits and visitors to the platform is decreasing rapidly. This is mainly because generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, but also GitHub’s CoPilot, can write code for which programmers previously went to Stack Overflow.