Stack Overflow has long been the go-to hub for developers looking for a solution to their programming problems. You’d think with the advent of AI, Stack Overflow would be staring down its own end-of-life support, but the truth is more complicated than that.
Data for background context
Hopeseekr on Github posted a data dump of stats from Stack Overflow, showing the number of questions asked since the site was first launched in 2008.
A few key items to note:
- Prior to Prashanth Chandrasekar being appointed CEO in Oct 2019, the number of questions was already in decline.
- Small, sharp increase in questions around Apr/May 2020 during the first lockdowns of Covid-19.
- Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for 1.8B in June 2021.
- ChatGPT launched in Nov 2022, further pushing the number of questions down.
It’s worth noting, that over the course of time, many programming questions have been answered, upvoted, and largely addressed with a peer reviewed, upvoted solution. Meaning fewer questions need to be asked as the answer already exists and can be found easily. So it makes sense to a degree, that these questions will decline over time.
So what? Why does this matter to me?
The decline of Stack Overflow is a significant concern for developers due to its role as a comprehensive, publicly accessible knowledge hub that has been instrumental in troubleshooting and professional development. Its Q&A format ensures that answers to programming challenges are peer-reviewed, validated, and improved by a global community of developers.
In contrast, AI tools often generate solutions without real-time collaboration or discussion, which can lead to incomplete or incorrect responses. The absence of Stack Overflow’s reliable content moderation system would force developers to spend more time validating solutions, slowing down their workflows and possibly leading to more errors.
In the best case scenario, Stack Overflow supports collaboration, mentorship, and skill-building for software developers at all levels. New developers gain invaluable insights by interacting with experienced professionals, while contributors can establish their reputations and showcase their expertise. This dynamic fosters a sense of community and growth within the developer ecosystem.
As the de-facto centralised developer platform, the community risks fragmentation across smaller, unstructured platforms, making it harder to access consistent, high-quality answers. This decentralisation may result in inconsistent coding practices, negatively impacting both individual developers and teams and ultimately, corporations and businesses who employ developers.
What does this mean for the future of Stack Overflow?
We now know that the decline of Stack Overflow was already in motion for a few years before ChatGPT even entered the public’s radar, and since ChatGPT is so easily accessible, responds faster, and without human judgement and smarminess, I personally cannot see how Stack Overflow, at least in its current form, can continue on.
Asking questions is the main key driver of success for Stack Overflow, and since that is already approaching zero, alarm bells should have been going off long before we even caught wind of it.
The company will definitely need to lean into its own AI, which they are doing with OverflowAI. However, this was announced about a year ago, and there’s nothing online about it since. No landing pages, no owned assets to educate the users, even as developers, we’ve only just heard of it when researching for this article. Turns out, if you Google search “OverflowAI”, it doesn’t even show up in the SERPs (search engine results pages), you need to dig around the site in order to find it.
What does this mean for the future of AI?
I don’t think it’s a secret that AI’s such as ChatGPT, Claude AI, Google’s Gemini, and Perplexity AI source and train their models by scraping data off the internet. And what better source of programming advice than Stack Overflow where there is a question and upvoted and chosen answer.
With fewer questions asked, over time, this will mean less real-world, context-rich examples of coding challenges and solutions, which enhance the training and fine-tuning of language models. A decline in the availability of fresh, peer-reviewed data from Stack Overflow could limit the diversity and quality of future AI training data, potentially leading to less accurate or relevant responses for coding-related queries as both programming languages and spoken languages change over time.
Moreover, without the rigorous vetting process that comes from community-driven platforms, AI-generated solutions may drift toward homogenisation, offering repetitive or overly generic advice, or worse, outdated code and practices.
Stack Overflow’s community discussions, corrections, and debates introduce nuance and context to problem-solving, something that AI alone may struggle to replicate without access to dynamic, real-world examples. Furthermore, AI models may become less capable of reflecting the current trends in software development, potentially leading to outdated recommendations or a lack of adaptability when new programming frameworks or methodologies emerge.