Since 2008, Stack Overflow has been an immensely helpful resource for developers, allowing them to crowdsource answers to their coding questions — and resulting in a vast online repository of coding knowledge.
But as Dev Class reports, the advent of generative AI appears to have caused an extinction-level event for the platform, with the number of monthly questions plummeting significantly since around the time ChatGPT burst onto the scene in late 2022.
The data, as accessed through Stack Overflow’s own Data Explorer, tells a dramatic story. The number of questions per month fell from over 21,000 in January 2025 to a measly 3,607 by December. Back in the start of 2023, it was fielding 100,000 per month.
The issue? Large language model-based tools like OpenAI’s blockbuster chatbot have allowed programmers to get coding help with simple text prompts, foregoing the need to take their questions to Stack Overflow.
There’s a meta twist: Stack Overflow signed a partnership with OpenAI in 2024 in an effort to “strengthen the world’s most popular large language models” — either leaning into the inevitable or hastening its own demise, depending on your perspective.
It’s a confounding situation. The company introduced an “AI Assist” feature, described as a “new way for users to access our 17 years of expert knowledge,” last month. Yet, as Dev Class points out, using generative AI to answer questions on the platform is still banned.
Disillusioned users argued that the site’s often hostile and “toxic” community has contributed to its decline as well, criticizing the company for allowing moderators to mishandle duplicate queries, for instance. Many users have grown frustrated with being shut down for asking already-answered questions.
“Of course, one could point to 2022 and say ‘look, it’s because of AI,’ and yes, AI certainly accelerated the decline, but this is the result of consistently punishing users for trying to participate in your community,” one Reddit user argued. “People were just happy to finally have a tool that didn’t tell them their questions were stupid.”
Others pointed out that the most important questions simply may have already been asked.
“I very rarely find that I need to ask new questions on Stack Overflow,” another user wrote. “A problem is either trivial enough that I can find the answer myself, common enough that someone’s already asked before, or so difficult and so niche that asking other people for help is fruitless.”
Programmers are concerned about what comes next, especially considering the well-documented shortcomings of AI. Hallucinations are still a major issue, forcing developers to spend significant amounts of time fixing errors.
The more practical question: when new technologies are deployed, and Stack Overflow is a husk, where will the AIs get their coding info from?
Stack Overflow “was by far the leading source of high quality answers to technical questions,” one user argued on Hacker News. “What do LLMs train off of now?”
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