From dev lifeline to ghost town: Stack Overflow activity fades

As artificial intelligence (AI) advances continue to change our lives and industries across the board down to their core, Stack Overflow – a popular question-and-answer website for computer programmers – seems to be one of its casualties.

Notably, as large language models (LLMs) become more popular, they have gradually made Stack Overflow irrelevant, according to the data shared earlier by Gergely Orosz, the author of the Pragmatic Engineer newsletter and blog, and recorded at Stack Exchange.

Monthly questions asked on Stack Overflow. Source: Pragmatic Engineer — *Monthly questions asked on Stack Overflow. Source:* *Pragmatic Engineer*

How Stack Overflow activity deteriorated

As Orosz pointed out, the decline in questions started in 2014, when Stack Overflow made dramatic changes in moderator efficiency, leading to questions being closed faster and in greater volume, and ‘low quality’ questions removed more efficiently.

After a short-lived jump in traffic in March 2020 due to COVID-19 lockdowns and forced remote working, the volume of questions continued to decline in June 2020, this time moving even faster. In June 2021, a private equity investor, Prosus, purchased it for $1.8 billion, right before its terminal drop.

In November 2022, the launch of ChatGPT coincided with a further, more rapid decrease in the number of questions, as the LLM emerged as a strong alternative thanks to being faster and trained on Stack Overflow data, and not having moderators.

Finally, in May 2025, the number of monthly questions dropped to 20,572 (down over 93% from the all-time high of 302,381 in May 2020), the same level as when the platform launched in 2009, and this trend continued in June, recording mere 8,087 questions so far – and it’s already June 18.

Stack Overflow questions since launch until June 18. Source: Stack Exchange — *Stack Overflow questions since launch until June 18. Source:* *Stack Exchange*

In Orosz’s words, now it’s just a matter of time before Stack Overflow disappears for good:

“The question seems to be when Stack Overflow will wind down operations, or the owner sells the site for comparative pennies, not if it will happen.”

Meanwhile, developers have got lots of new options with the evolution of AI, just one example being the Gemini AI in Android Studio adding support for multimodal inputs, allowing users to attach images directly in the prompts and build higher-quality applications.