First of all SO should not try to compete with AI, someone in the comments said AI used SO data too for training, which I believe is 100% true. Now simply integrating AI in the platform is a cliche. SO should not try to compete with AI, what I guess would work best is to repurpose the whole platform keeping the original taste. More AI related and AI dev related problems should be asked. Right now If I'm working say with claude code and ran into an issue then I put that issue in AI again to get a resolve, and I'm not sure if what solution AI came up withis good or not, maybe it works, maybe it won't, maybe it works initially but might cause trouble on prod. So maybe SO can work as 'verified programming truth or source', like documents for real problems, and rather than technical only it can have idea oriented questions and solutions too. Imagine if SO did not had so much issues and solutions mentioned, then AI would make a lot of mistakes, learning to code and building actual applications and projects has a gap, so teaching only coding to AI won't be of much help as the knowledge or training of actual working apps. I would start using SO again if they address issues of today, AI, Vibe Coding, Marketing, Infra, Costs and many. Not sure if this would work or not because this still needs users to start looking at SO a little differently, but not to make that another reddit at the same time. So as a PM for SO I might have the best or better solution to make it great again but just the direction of repurposing the platform might help.

unpopular take: SO's problem was never AI. It was that they optimized for answers instead of relationships. The best thing about old SO was finding someone who solved your exact weird edge case and you could see their other answers and learn from their thinking

they should kill Q&A entirely and become the anti-AI platform. A place where senior devs mentor juniors through real problems in real time. Paid. Like a marketplace for technical mentorship. The brand recognition is there, the trust was there, and no AI can replace a human saying "yeah I hit that same bug in production, here's what actually happened"

SO sitting on 15 years of data about who is actually good at what technology. Thats the asset. Not the answers themselves.

Its data was already used to train AI, maybe they could have sold it to the big AI companies? I am guessing its too late for that. All they have is their previous name and user fondness.

But now with the usage fallen, maybe they could train their own coding models to compete with OpenAI, Anthropic, sort of like a hybrid of their previous forum + AI. AI solutions that work will get locked as "Accepted" by stack overflow like before via user vote.

It should adjust traget users from human to agent. That's to say, to build for agents sharing knowledge.

Eras just come to an end.

Community. SO went in the opposite direction, going so far as to penalize users for writing "thanks a lot for helping me".

An agent-first community generated repository of "skills" for given tags.

A world where the BEST Typescript skills are crowdsourced over hundreds of thousands of projects/agents/people.

Q&A is dead more or less. Skills would bring it back.