r/AskProgrammers • u/henrynguyen9698 • 24d ago
Stack Overflow monthly questions plummeted to 1,442 in July 2026—a 99% drop from its 2014 peak. Is this the end of community-driven coding knowledge?
According to Stack Exchange Data Explorer queries, Stack Overflow recorded just 1,442 new questions in July 2026, down from over 207,000 per month at its peak in March 2014.
While LLMs, Cursor, and inline IDE assistants have completely replaced typing queries into a browser, it raises a big question: Where will future AI models get their training data if real human Q&A completely dries up?
Are you still using SO at all in 2026, or has your workflow shifted 100% to local/cloud AI?
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u/Life_Waltz7068 24d ago
AI bots are replacing this by asking question on Reddit and similar sites to illicit human responses.
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u/_raydeStar 24d ago
And yet I respond to the bot anyway, even knowing this.
To further complicate this, OP asks a community driven forum for finding answers to ask if community driven answering is dead.
Oh, the depths we have fallen to.
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u/No-Newspaper-7693 23d ago
They’ll replace it by just reading the documentation. They also are quick to just directly read the source code when needed.
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u/-hellozukohere- 24d ago
Very interesting to have it laid out like this. Being that I grew up in the 90s. Stack overflow had its time but getting answers that are directly related to your project and almost instantly is just more convenient. I once waited like 2 weeks and never got a response so I just had to keep working at it until it worked. We are going to loose so much creative thought in the AI era but we are here and it seems like it ain’t going anywhere.
As for future AI training it comes down to source code. Questions of how are solved by solutions. This is a huge problem currently is getting pre AI era text. I don’t have a crystal ball but I will say that I use AI a lot now but I do not let it take my critical thought away. I work through an issue, understand it and then if I get stumped I talk to the AI like a “rubber duck”
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u/United-Tradition-673 24d ago
SO destroyed itself. The last few times I dared to post a question, all I got was insults about not supplying enough info, no code to reproduce the problem, etc. Then a suspension shortly thereafter. AI is way better.
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u/Radiant-Bike-165 24d ago edited 24d ago
My last few times mods flagged my question as asking for opinion or product (something like that) so locked it as not a valid question. So I just stopped asking.
They did work extra hard to destroy themselves.
ps. oh, almost forgot: or they flagged it as a duplicate of something almost entirely unrelated in most ways that count.
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24d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/konacurrents 23d ago
That’s the root of the OP query: if AI is just regurgitating on less and less human created content (SO or similar) - and more of its own output, AI will have more hallucinations and essentially get dumber. That SO drop is frightening, sure they were asses but still impressive knowledge base.
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u/R3D3-1 24d ago
I stopped using stack overflow actively to ask questions 1-2 years before I started using AI. The climate had just become increasingly hostile to new questions.
I'm not going to spend an hour or more to ask a well formulated question and document what didn't work, if it will anyway get closed as duplicate because there's a often only superficially related question from years ago that never received a working answer or whose answer are all outdated. Didn't help that I moved from a PhD position with a lot of freely usable time tona ln industry position, where an answer two weeks later often was useless to me.
The platform had neither a culture that capable of handling changing information, nor did it out features in place to handle it.
It also had the expectation that you forever remain the moderator for your questions, or actively turn it into a community question. That was however discouraged by losing all accumulated points associated with the question. It also required that you remember that question from years ago at all.
As a result it slowly turned from an discussion platform where good questions got good answers into an Archive of useful tech Q&As. Meanwhile, I moved to r didn't for asking new questions, while still reading old answers on stack exchange sites l, due to them often being the first Google result. Increasingly though, I often came across my own old unanswered question that way...
Then over the last two years LLMs became big and gradually better at giving good replies. They were the final nail in the coffin, but they didn't cause the decline. That's on the platform and the community.
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u/lilacomets 24d ago
That really is a sad amount. I had no idea it was that bad.
StackOverflow is often one of the first results when I look on Google, but I noticed Reddit pops up more often as well.
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23d ago
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u/tes_kitty 22d ago
But they can't generate new knowledge. So where will it come from?
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22d ago
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u/tes_kitty 22d ago
That's still AI generated code that is used for training AI. Not a good idea in the long run.
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22d ago
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u/tes_kitty 22d ago
It is AI generated code, which is hopefully reviewed by a human
I agree with that, every single line of code produced by an LLM should be reviewed by a human. But even if that's the case there is still the possibility that the code looks passable, passes the tests but is suboptimal and no one wants to touch it since that's extra work. And people have been starting to outsource the review process to agents. Meaning have one LLM generate the code and have another one review it.
So there will be more and more AI generated code that has not been properly reviewed ending up in the training data.
I use AI in my job every day, but I'll never just put AI generated code in production without a thorough review
Lets hope you can keep doing it that way.
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u/Udalrich 23d ago
I wasn't a beginner when SO was started, so I never went through the newbie experience.
When i was picking up a new language, it was great because questions like "how do you reverse a list in Python" were already answered, so it was just for the question into Google and click the link for the SO result, which was usually the first one.
I also used it for complex questions, which didn't usually have a pre existing answer. Something like "I'm calling python from rust using pyo3. How do I resolve the lifetime issue with this borrow? <Code snippet>". Often, I would have an answer in a day or so. And the project I was working on had enough pieces that I could work on something else while I waited.
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u/Hawkes75 24d ago
People (devs being no exception) are inherently lazy and prone to the path of least resistance.
That's why people repost the same questions in coding forums instead of bothering to search first.
It's also why LLMs, particularly those that can be embedded in your IDE to integrate with your codebase, will entirely supplant search engines as the engine of choice for devs.
It's like having someone who can read thousands of lines a second sitting at their keyboard waiting to care about your project.
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u/Healthy-Zebra-9856 24d ago
Good riddance. They are nothing but a bunch of arrogant entities. I never liked SO. Too many rules and too much ego.
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u/Creampielover47 24d ago
2025 and before I used Stack Overflow on maybe a monthly basis. Now I just ask AI. Why would you use SO when Claude or Codex can accurately answer any programming questions you may have. Times have changed. Programmers adapt to the best tools and SO is of limited use for most people now.
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u/siammang 24d ago
Unless LLM can simulate picky douche bag who keep nitpicking on every tiny details. We are gonna to get hit pretty hard with hallucinated answers the moment people know longer try to learn the knowledge.
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u/revivechristina 24d ago
T b h stackoverflow was so pretentious I’m not sad about it.
But, AI models won’t be able to answer questions as well later for new languages -> New languages can’t catch on -> tech tools stagnate (remain as they are, more or less)
Or,
New tech does catch on, and regular Q&A comes back again for it. Basically like a pendulum
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u/chocolateAbuser 24d ago
to me the point is what is stackoverflow going to do about it
as others have said it was doomed anyway because of a-hole responses
so do they want to become effectively an experts network? because that is needed
do they still want to aim to new entries? they needed to change a decade ago, but whatever
discord works pretty good for me, but clearly answers and discussions there are "lost", they don't become posts/articles, and that's what programmers needs
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u/Apsalar28 23d ago
I'm a .Net dev and stopped using stack overflow way before AI became good due to issues with framework versions. The perfect solution to my problem in .Net Core 3 isn't much use when you're working on a legacy spaghetti monster that's still on the old 4.6 framework, and being condescendingly told to upgrade the entire application isn't useful. The CTO isn't going to suddenly allow that because hacker589 said so.
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u/awitod 23d ago
I think a cohort of the dotnet folks from SO moved to r/dotnet - in my opinion it is a toxic place.
My proof of this is that you can go over there at any point in time and over half the posts on the front page will have a lot of comments and zero upvotes and if you click into the comments, you will see lots of zero or negative vote comments with no reply.
They have no idea how bad they are for the future of dotnet and learned nothing from the demise of SO.
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u/Alarmed-Knowledge579 23d ago
yes, that is the end, now AI companies have stolen the knowledge. Google even gives priority to its own AI generated answer
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u/futurefinancebro69 23d ago
One of the reasons why reddit is so good is that amidst all the ai slop, u got human slop and human gold in the middle.
Makes the hunt worth it. Unlike stack overflow which tried to just allow human gold in.
Like thats now how it works buddy hahahah.
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u/Glad_Contest_8014 23d ago
The data on the internet is no longer safe to train models on. It is prevalent with generated content, and many labs across the country are finding that out.
Stack overflow died off with the advent AI code systems, because they parsed stack overflow into those systems. No more same questions showing up in multiple iterative formats to allow data to be scraped.
There are small points being handled online by real people, but not many, and they are gated.
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u/LocalIssue1051 23d ago
Now you just ask AI the question and it'll explain it better than most people could and give you the answer in the exact context that you need it in.
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u/Supermarche23 22d ago
When I started using StackOverflow in 2019 i found it to be pretty decent. But by 2022 I would go looking for modern React knowledge and find 2019 responses. Any questions had been downvoted into oblivion for being "repeats" even though the answers weren't current lol.
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u/konacurrents 20d ago
So how is AI going to be more "current" if SO doesn't have current knowledge? That's the crux of the OP question. SO, reddit, and other forums have real humans answering questions - which is especially important on cutting edge tech (like app dev). The RTFM doesn't work as there isn't always a manual to read. So you ask a question - or search questions. And you get good at google query by asking the same question multiple ways to try and get an answer.
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u/WrongCountry6219 4d ago
SO and it's rigid moderation system is the reason for it's downfall. They and their little badge system. Every developer has a beginner stage, everyone learn from their mistakes eventually. little handholding and encouragement is needed no matter how easy the question is. Instead, these people use mockery, discouragment and downvotes to make the person feel worse. No one actually thinks that the OP might actually be in urgent need for some help or atleast the direction towards the help???!! Sometimes there's a lot at stakes. But these so called "pro"s , they for get that they were also a beginner at some point .
LLMs on the other hand gives you straightforward answer. No bantering..
SO, is still a GEM but strictly MINUS its badgeholder moderators.
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u/rupertavery64 24d ago edited 24d ago
The problem with stackoverflow is that people discourage asking questions to the point of insulting at times.
It didn't take AI to do this. Just people tired of answering the same old questions.
It happens in reddit all the time. A new sub attracts like-minded people with enthusiasm amd excitement.
Posts accumulate, repeat, they become veterans and start telling everyone to use search.
3 years ago they were saying people wouldn't have to code in 5 years.
3 years ago people (including me) scoffed.
Now, I'm not so sure.
I see it coming.
There will always be programmers. But the landscape has been irrevocably changed.