Stack Overflow, the website that basically taught an entire generation how to code

#ai #coding #programming #webdev

Remember Stack Overflow? Well, it fell off a cliff post-AI. The website that basically taught an entire generation how to code just recorded its lowest month of questions since it literally launched. We’re talking about 3,862 questions last month, almost the same number as the very first month it went live back in 2008. 18 years of growth, completely erased.

You get the data here: Graph

And if you look at the graph, it tells one of the most dramatic stories in tech. Stack Overflow went from basically nothing to over 200,000 questions a month by 2014. It became the backbone of software development. Every programmer had that same experience: copying code from a Stack Overflow answer and praying it worked. For years, it stayed there, dominating.

Then something started shifting around 2016. The decline was slow at first. Reddit became a legitimate place to get coding help. Discord servers popped up where you could ask questions in real time. Even with all that competition, Stack Overflow was still massive.

And then came the cliff. Around 2022–2023, the line just drops. We all know what happened. ChatGPT launched. The cursor came out. GitHub Copilot actually became useful. Suddenly, Stack Overflow’s entire value proposition evaporated overnight.

Because here’s the thing: Stack Overflow’s whole deal was searching for a question, finding someone with the same problem, and copying their solution. Now you just describe your problem to an AI and get a custom answer in seconds.

And the irony? The same LLMs that killed Stack Overflow were trained on Stack Overflow. The site contributed so much to the collective knowledge of programming that the AIs learned from it, and then made it obsolete.

It’s kind of poetic in a dark way.
The real question now is whether Stack Overflow can adapt, or if it’s going to fade away completely.