The number of questions on Stack Overflow fell by 78 percent in December 2025 compared to a year earlier. Developers are switching en masse to AI tools in
This is not because AI is good at answering programming questions accurately, it’s because SO sucks. The graph shows its growth leveling off around 2014 and then starting the decline around 2016, which isn’t even temporally correlated with LLMs.
Sites like SO where experienced humans can give insightful answers to obscure programming questions are clearly still needed. Every time I ask AI a programming question about something obscure, it usually knows less than I do, and if I can’t find a post where another human had the same problem, I’m usually left to figure it out for myself.
It was a toxic garbage heap way before 2016. I remember creating an account to try building karma there back in about 2011 when doing that was seen as a good way to land senior job roles. Gave up very quickly.
This is not because AI is good at answering programming questions accurately, it’s because SO sucks. The graph shows its growth leveling off around 2014 and then starting the decline around 2016, which isn’t even temporally correlated with LLMs.
Sites like SO where experienced humans can give insightful answers to obscure programming questions are clearly still needed. Every time I ask AI a programming question about something obscure, it usually knows less than I do, and if I can’t find a post where another human had the same problem, I’m usually left to figure it out for myself.
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2016 is probably when they removed freedom by introducing aggressive moderation to remove duplicates and ban people
It was a toxic garbage heap way before 2016. I remember creating an account to try building karma there back in about 2011 when doing that was seen as a good way to land senior job roles. Gave up very quickly.