How Stack Overflow is competing with AI – Jody Bailey (CPTO, Stack Overflow)
Artificial Intelligence has changed the way developers work—and Stack Overflow is right at the centre of that shift. In this episode of The Product Experience, Jody Bailey, CPTO at Stack Overflow, shares how the platform is adapting to AI, protecting its community, and embracing new revenue streams. We explore how LLMs are reshaping developer behaviour, why canonical answers still matter, and what it takes to keep trust, quality and community alive in the age of instant AI-generated code. If you’re working on dev tools, building with AI, or just wondering how to keep your product relevant through disruption, this one’s for you.
Key Takeaways
- AI is both a disruptor and an enabler
- Engagement is shifting, not disappearing
- Community remains the core asset
- AI doesn't kill quality—it challenges it
- Prompt engineering is the new entry-level skill
- Innovation is iterative—even with AI
- Stack is designing for tomorrow’s engineers
- Jody’s vision is long term
Chapters
00:00 – Intro to Jody Bailey and his role at Stack Overflow
03:30 – Impact of AI and shift in how developers search for answers
07:45 – Stack’s new business model: licensing data to LLMs
10:15 – Protecting community-contributed data and enforcing attribution
13:20 – Changing nature of search and the role of AI
17:00 – Trust, verification, and the evolving user experience
21:10 – Internal AI experiments and lessons learned
25:00 – Balancing community, learning, and AI-powered answers
28:20 – New skills required for developers in an AI world
31:40 – Evolving engineering roles and the future of team structures
36:10 – Making Stack Overflow accessible for the next generation
39:50 – What Jody’s most excited about for the future
Featured links
Stack Overflow
Stack Overflow for Teams
Jeff Atwood’s blog – referenced during the discussion
Product Experience podcast YouTube – full episode
Paul Adams on Intercom + AI – previous reference mentioned in the episode
Prompt Engineering for Developers – useful resource discussed indirectly
About the author
The Product Experience
Join our podcast hosts Lily Smith and Randy Silver for in-depth conversations with some of the best product people around the world! Every week they chat with people in the know, covering the topics that matter to you - solving real problems, developing awesome products, building successful teams and developing careers. Find out more, subscribe, and access all episodes on The Product Experience homepage.
