Where have all the questions gone?
I've left Matlab Answers in spring 2023. At this time the forum was full of interesting programming questions, e.g about optimizing code. A bunch of experienced Matlab users have discussed diefferent approachs and compared them. Some questions have concerned beginner problems and home work solutions, others belonged to professionally used tools for scientific work
Every week some new tools for dailiy use have been posted in the FileExchange.
Today, 3 years later, the traffic is much lower and questions concern the correct usage of Matlab commands usually. Submissions in the FileExchange are very specific and rarely useful for general programming jobs.
What has happend?
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Why did you leave the forum in 2023, when you thought it worked interestingly back then? :)
But otherwise I agree with you. In recent years, FEX has been a parade of generally unusable functions, because they relate to completely specific applications, or are often completely trivial.
The Questions are often very basic and the answers to them are increasingly generated by AI.
My theory explaining this situation is the following:
1. The main reason for this state of affairs is the onset of massive use of AI. The vast majority of questions related to MATLAB are now answered by AI, often very competently.
2. Programming in MATLAB at the basic user level is now completely covered by AI programming tools. The current best AI-LLMs provide the ability to create MATLAB projects at an almost professional level with minimal human effort.
3. This state of affairs is largely supported by TMW itself, thanks to the massive promotion of AI support tools integrated into the IDE.
Until now, the main source of training data for AI-LLM was discussion forums. But that is slowly but surely coming to an end. Discussion forums, where new know-how was often created, are dying out due to the absence of really interesting topics and problems. The Questions portal is a perfect example of this
FEX has become a free of charge showcase. A number of contributions to FEX recently have more or less zero information value. For example, the flood of heuristic optimization methods based on all possible analogies is laughable. FEX is probably also considered a publishing activity ... ??!!
@Michal : I've needed a break due to health reasons. Now I've reached stability for some time.
The explanation of massiv AI use is convincing. Does this mean that pupils and students do not learn programming with Matlab anymore, but they are trained to let AIs find efficient algorithms?
In the next step the programmers dependent on the AI tools, because nobody learned to solve problem with his or her own head anymore.
What a dystopic scenario. I'm a dynosaur who likes to works with his own hands and brain. Then Matlab Answers is not the best place to spend my limited time. Bye - and thanks for the fish!
I hear the relative drop of MATLAB questions in Stackoverflow is even worse.
I can confirm that. On Stackoverflow are only 2 questions in July related to the MATLAB. A year ago was typical rate about 20-30 questions per month.
The other trend I've observed is the percentage of Simulink/Simscape questions has skyrocketed while MATLAB specific has decreased.
I have noticed that too. The volume of questions I feel I understand well enough to answer has dropped substantially.
Perhaps the absolute number of Simulink/Simscape questions hasn't increased (maybe it even dropped), but when most other questions disappear, their share goes to >90%.
I went from 20-30 answers per month to single digit, if that (although life circumstances reducing my free time also didn't help).
There is a same trend on MATLAB subreddit. Maybe Simulink questions are not easy to answered by Gen AI.
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