# Stack Overflow in Github: Any Snippets There?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.01198 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.01198/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 2 May 2017.

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Instruct or Interact? Exploring and Eliciting LLMs' Capability in Code Snippet Adaptation Through Prompt Engineering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15501/) (2024)
- [Can Machines Read Coding Manuals Yet? -- A Benchmark for Building Better Language Models for Code Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07452/) (2021)
- [Can LLM Prompting Serve as a Proxy for Static Analysis in Vulnerability Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.12039/) (2024)
- [AdaptEval: A Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models on Code Snippet Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.04540/) (2026)
- [Coding in a Bubble? Evaluating LLMs in Resolving Context Adaptation Bugs During Code Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.06497/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

When programmers look for how to achieve certain programming tasks, Stack Overflow is a popular destination in search engine results. Over the years, Stack Overflow has accumulated an impressive knowledge base of snippets of code that are amply documented. We are interested in studying how programmers use these snippets of code in their projects. Can we find Stack Overflow snippets in real projects? When snippets are used, is this copy literal or does it suffer adaptations? And are these adaptations specializations required by the idiosyncrasies of the target artifact, or are they motivated by specific requirements of the programmer? The large-scale study presented on this paper analyzes 909k non-fork Python projects hosted on Github, which contain 290M function definitions, and 1.9M Python snippets captured in Stack Overflow. Results are presented as quantitative analysis of block-level code cloning intra and inter Stack Overflow and GitHub, and as an analysis of programming behaviors through the qualitative analysis of our findings.