Stack Overflow's question volume has been falling since ChatGPT went public in November 2022 (OpenAI). The site that trained a generation of developers, and most of the AI tools those developers now use, is slowly emptying out.
In October 2023, Stack Overflow laid off 28% of its staff (Stack Overflow Blog). CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar framed it as a restructuring toward profitability. Everyone in the industry understood the real cause. Traffic was down. The thing causing it was sitting in every developer's browser tab.
This is not another "AI killed Stack Overflow" piece. That take is everywhere and it misses the actual problem. The interesting part is the feedback loop, and it points somewhere uncomfortable for the AI industry itself.
The conventional story, and what it misses
The popular version goes like this. Developers used to paste error messages into Google and land on a Stack Overflow thread. Now they paste the same error into ChatGPT, Claude, or Copilot and get a direct answer. Why click through to a forum, risk a condescending comment, and wait for a human when a model answers in two seconds?
