Two or three months ago, I noticed that my Go tutorials were not receiving the level of engagement I was expecting, with fewer comments and saved posts. The first thing that popped into my mind was that I was slipping. Then I absorbed the larger data, and it seems this isn't a me problem; this is an industry problem.
The figures are appalling.
Begin on Stack Overflow, which was the most comprehensive reference library for technology. During 2014 to 2020 Question volume reached a maximum of over 2,00,000 per month. It ended up below 50,000 already in late 2025, wiping out 15 years of increases. A January 2026 data visualization, built from Stack Overflow's own Data Explorer, showed the platform's monthly question volume had fallen back to roughly what it was in 2008, the year the site launched. The same 2025 Developer Survey found that while 82% of respondents still visit Stack Overflow at least a few times a month, only 25% do so daily or more often, a shift from the platform's old status as a daily habit for most programmers.
It's not just one platform which is in trouble. Invisible, though, is the larger behaviour change, one that goes beyond the visible symptom, namely that developers no longer consult written references first.
Rather than "Where everybody was," here is "Where everyone went.
They went to AI. In the past, this was a rarity, no longer the exception. Approximately 84% (up from 76% a year ago) of all developers use or plan to use AI coding tools, according to an AI Coding Assistant survey Stack Overflow conducted this year. Developers report being most comfortable turning to AI for tasks like searching for answers, learning new concepts, and writing documentation, and 44% of developers now use AI tools to learn to code, up from 37% the year before. Interestingly enough, when developers are asked what their favourite tools of the art are best at, "creating documentation" and "explaining any existing code" are near the top of the list, ahead of "writing new code from scratch.
The final one is worthy of contemplation: developers are increasingly turning to AI to explain a concept rather than write plain, original code for them. That's right, a direct miss on everything that the tutorial does at its core, which is explaining.
No wonder, it's not that difficult! The tutorial is geared to the "average reader" (as it's called). A question is directly written for you right now with your stack trace, your file, your specific stupid typo. No pages of preamble to scroll through to discover just one line of config that you needed, no "Closed as duplicate" and no ads, just an answer tuned to your exact problem.
However, this doesn't seem to be a clean sweep for AI.
And this is where it gets more interesting than 'AI beat tutorials, tutorials are dead!'. Usage is on the increase, but trust is not. Some 46% lack confidence in the accuracy of AI-generated output, up from 31% a year ago, and nearly two-thirds feel AI frequently generates code that seems correct but isn't necessarily reliable. In fact, according to research from METR, seasoned developers actually took 19% longer to accomplish their tasks using AI tools; however, they felt they finished 20% faster after completing the work. There is definitely an overestimation of how much AI is actually supporting people.
An even more acute concern is piling up regarding junior developers. They do not develop the predispositions they need when they rely on AI to solve their problems rather than on docs and forums. They can possibly write working code without knowing how it works, which is okay up until the moment the AI goes off-track by making a minor mistake that it finds hard to track in the code; at that point, they don't have a solid base to lean on if it goes astray.
It is not a matter of "tutorials stink, AI is good. It's that developers have settled on a path that's more time-consuming and difficult, and that offers the chance to develop real comprehension, rather than a quicker way that yields an answer with little assurance it's correct.
Popular lessons can be seen when you write tutorials. Writing tutorials will show some of the popular lessons.
This is not that it is time to halt its development; it's just that it's time to modify what you write and how. Generic explanation/memorized text is strong, with the notable exception of gotchas or "why this worked last month, and not now", explaining architectural trade-offs is strong, but nothing concerning a fast-changing library or a particular corner case is strong. Well, that's where a good article still gets its power from. It also helps when you are aware of the fact that unless the AI does an excellent job with their answer, your reader is not coming to your post cold, rather they are here because they want to take a look at it to see if it matches their requirements and/or sanity, so if you write assuming they came to your post because the AI answer did not suffice, it will benefit more than an answer they are reaching for from cold.
Optimise for skimmability and machine-readability as well, because these days there's a decent portion of traffic that's not coming to you from a human who's reading from top to bottom, but rather there's a machine there reading your page to respond to the query of someone else. Headings, explicit statements of code, and clear explanations benefit both the writer and the reader. Finally, don't forget to be more specific about the "why" rather than the "how" — it's the one thing that thin AI answers so rarely but the most crucial part of what junior developers need and the part that will keep a human reader on your page.
What direction this is taking
I don't know why, but tutorials don't just disappear. I don't think the form that dies is a particularly useful way to get X configured, since there's a much simpler prompt that does the job more easily. The things that remain, perhaps even grow, are the pieces of writing that convey judgment, negotiation, nuance, and detail that have not yet been fully captured through modelling.
So was the love for reading changed. It wasn't until somebody "got it" that the need for someone who actually understood the problem.
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