Timeline for AI Assist is now available on Stack Overflow
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
17 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Dec 16, 2025 at 13:43 | comment | added | Ash Zade Staff | @pilchard what's preventing people from posting real, relevant questions to the community? We have two ways for people to do that from AI Assist. | |
| Dec 16, 2025 at 8:31 | comment | added | pilchard | @AshZade you seem to be being willfully obtuse in this point. Maybe the staff has simply been replaced by agentic AI? If you want more 'engagement with the community' then remove the AI widget and let people post real, relevant questions TO THE COMMUNITY. | |
| Dec 10, 2025 at 12:37 | comment | added | Ash Zade Staff | @MattJohnson-Pint which part, the side nav link going to SO or the assumption to send everyone to SO to post a new question? | |
| Dec 10, 2025 at 5:10 | comment | added | Matt Johnson-Pint | @AshZade - That sounds like an artificial, self-made constraint, TBQH. | |
| Dec 9, 2025 at 17:54 | comment | added | Ash Zade Staff | @MattJohnson-Pint ah, one detail is that all side nav links to AI Assist from across the network go to stackoverflow.com/ai-assist right now so we can't assume all usage will be for SO topics only. | |
| Dec 9, 2025 at 17:08 | comment | added | Matt Johnson-Pint | @AshZade I mean - if one is on Stack Overflow, it shouldn't say "Ask me anything", it should say something like, "Ask me anything about software development." If I ask about baking a cake (the example given here), then it's response should be something like, "Sorry, Stack Overflow is about software development. Click here to read about what is on-topic for this site. For questions about baking, try cooking.stackexchange.com.", etc. In other words, use AI as a filter to keep out the noise, and to direct users to communities they wouldn't otherwise know about. | |
| Dec 9, 2025 at 14:35 | comment | added | Ash Zade Staff | @MattJohnson-Pint can you say more about that? we do qualify questions for level of detail and what it's asking AI Assist to do to adhere to a few guardrails we've put in place. "on-topic" and "off-topic" in this context aren't very strict as we fetch content from across Stack Exchange, meaning technical and non-technical content. "On-topic" in this case to me has to do with the off-ramp to posting a question, which is fixed to Stack Overflow only for now. That will be dynamic as we continue development based on what the conversation is about. | |
| Dec 3, 2025 at 19:22 | comment | added | Matt Johnson-Pint | Shouldn't the first thing the AI does is determine if the question is on-topic? | |
| Dec 3, 2025 at 15:00 | comment | added | Ash Zade Staff | Sorry, I thought you meant the home page component. I got mixed up. Unfortunately the answer is the same: because it was hosted off-platform on stackoverflow.ai, we had no way to connect it to users on SO to track and understand behaviour. Now we will be able to. | |
| Dec 3, 2025 at 14:59 | comment | added | user400654 | @AshZade it was launched in June. | |
| Dec 3, 2025 at 14:57 | comment | added | Ash Zade Staff | @user400654 that's a great question. Given we just launched this yesterday, we don't know yet. My hypothesis is that they will spend more time on site and be served more content from SO than if they used traditional search. We'll share our findings as we collect data and can make more confident inferences. | |
| Dec 3, 2025 at 14:53 | comment | added | user400654 | @AshZade for those who do use the widget, how does their engagement on the site change, outside of using the widget? | |
| Dec 3, 2025 at 14:43 | history | edited | Joachim | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
fixed minor typo
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| Dec 3, 2025 at 6:20 | comment | added | NoDataDumpNoContribution | "baking cakes is not on-topic" Maybe you want to write software to run an oven and need some inside knowledge? | |
| Dec 2, 2025 at 17:51 | comment | added | Ash Zade Staff | It always ends with that line because we want encourage participating in the community. We take users to the SO ask page because the high majority of AI Assist usage has been for SO topics, but we plan to make the button dynamic to route to the right community or communities where there may be more than one. | |
| Dec 2, 2025 at 16:58 | comment | added | Rubén |
Also, we might ask, "why" the SO's AI Assist suggests to search "waky cake eggless recipe" ? It should only recommend searching for stuff that exists in Stack Overflow.
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| Dec 2, 2025 at 16:46 | history | answered | 0stone0 | CC BY-SA 4.0 |