Developer Q&A site Stack Overflow is launching a new program today that will give AI companies access to its knowledge base through a new API, aptly named OverflowAPI. The launch partner for this is Google, which will use Stack Overflow data to enrich Gemini for Google Cloud and provide validated Stack Overflow answers in the Google Cloud console. Meanwhile, Stack Overflow will work with Google to bring more AI-powered features to its platform, a process that already started last year with start OverflowAI.
Google and Stack Overflow plan to preview these integrations at Google’s Cloud Next conference in April.
It’s no secret that content-based services like Stack Overflow (but also Reddit, publishing houses, etc.) want to make sure they get paid when big language models absorb their data. While Google and Stack Overflow aren’t discussing the financial terms of this partnership, it’s worth noting that this isn’t an exclusive partnership.
“The way we think about it with Google is very specific to all the problems we want to solve for users,” Stack Overflow CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar told me. “Other companies — it’s been exciting the number of entries we’ve had from companies of all kinds experimenting with LLM education, with AI products — cloud companies and non-cloud companies that want to become cloud companies — all kinds of people trying to leverage our data in very, very powerful ways. This program, this OverflowAPI program, is absolutely available for all partners to work with us.”
However, a world where all developers can get their answers from an AI chatbot is also a world where far fewer developers visit the Stack Overflow site to ask and answer (and copy and paste) questions in their code). “We want to be wherever the developer is,” Chandrasekar told me when I asked him about it. And while he acknowledges that he believes developer workflow will change because of these AI tools, he still believes there is a need for a reliable knowledge base of validated answers. The ultimate vision here, he said, is to “bring humans and AI together” and ensure that developers can trust answers from AI tools because they come from a knowledge base created by subject matter experts.
It is also worth noting that this is not just about AI. Google will also bring Stack Overflow directly to the Google Cloud console and allow developers to view answers and ask questions directly from there.
“You can envision going to the Google Cloud console, typing in a query, and next to all the Google-specific answers, you’ll see Stack Overflow answers,” explained Gabe Monroy, Google’s vice president of developer experience for Google Cloud. . “These two things will start to merge from a developer experience perspective. Now, this is very important, because it means that developers have a smooth experience. No need to go hunting and clicking on different websites. Everything they’d want, Stack Overflow questions and answers, as well as Google Cloud-specific questions answered, all in one place.”
He also noted that Gemini answers will include cross-references so developers can check that the results are correct.
On Stack Overflow’s side, the idea is to use Gemini through Google’s Vertex AI platform. The team is currently evaluating what it will look like, but you can imagine AI support in the questioning and moderation processes, for example, as well as in the form of an assistant that can answer questions on the site.
Stack Overflow derives its value from having this huge user base of expert users and now more than a decade of questions and answers about almost any computer science problem (and while Stack Overflow also runs a network of similar sites on other topics, the focus is currently on the leading developer-oriented site). Chandrasekar noted that it is very important to ensure that this quality remains high and is not diluted by the low-quality responses coming from the AI itself. In part, this is why Google is integrating the human elements of the Stack Overflow platform.
“We want to keep the quality extremely high. It is supposed to be the best of the best in terms of quality and accuracy,” he said. He argued that the barrier to entry for asking questions will be much lower for many developers because they’ll be interacting with Geminis, not a group of opinionated fellow developers. You get a bit of the best of both worlds, which is fantastic,” he said.
Google’s Monroy also emphasized the importance of the human element in all of this. “As a team at Stack [Overflow] seems to be using Gemini to develop new features, making sure it doesn’t disrupt what’s beautiful and pristine about how Stack Overflow has served the developer community […] for many years — that is sacred.’
In the long term, Monroy said, Google may also use this partnership to improve its code integration model, currently called Codey.
