I just realized I haven’t been on Stack Overflow in a while.

Before writing this I found a post by dev user @abdulbasithh from 2025 and it’s still true today.

According to Google AI (ironic, I know)

“Stack Overflow has experienced a significant decline in user engagement and traffic since the rise of generative AI tools like ChatGPT.”

The Culture Problem

We’ve all seen the memes. You join the site as a junior, excited to learn, and your first question is met with:

“Thread closed. Not a real question. Also, why are you using that library? You should be using this obscure C++ wrapper instead. Read the docs.”

Gonna add my favorite meme from that era here:

Tom from Tom and Jerry getting pied in the face in response to stackoverflow question

Beyond the Copy-Paste Era

But there is a deeper shift happening for me personally. The toxic gatekeeping that was once a “quirk” of the platform became its Achilles’ heel. When better alternatives arrived, the community didn’t have enough goodwill left in the bank to keep people coming back.

Maybe I’ve become “entitled,” or maybe I’m just evolving as an engineer, but copying and pasting code from online forums feels incredibly backward now. The rise of agentic AI IDEs has also fueled this.

The Shift from Search to Synthesis.

Or maybe it’s not that I’m entitled; it’s that my time is better spent solving high-level problems than debugging a forum user’s 2014 syntax.

Opinions and Graphs from twitter

According to Twitter/X user frye:

stackoverflow is a ghost town now. it’s like walking through an abandoned liminal space. the top question from the past month has 78 upvotes and is titled “how can i avoid using LLMs as a software developer”

According to Twitter/X user Pranesh Prakash:

LLMs have brought with them the decline of Stack Overflow. Here is also an interesting graph that shows the decline of stackoverflow: From the introduction of ChatGPT and the mainstream adoption of LLMs.

Conclusion

Stack Overflow will always be a legendary archive of human knowledge, but as a daily tool? It feels like a relic. Perhaps we are moving toward a more conversational, integrated way of building software.

Hope to make a post later about the rise of AI and agentic IDEs.

PS: There is an even more forgotten relic When was the last time you read the documentation?💀😑 Here’s a meme:

Everybody focused on ChatGPT, stack overflow struggling, documentation forgotten

Media mentions:

Also posted on dev.to for Richard Djarbeng

Related Concepts & Posts

The following cards provide further definitions of concepts discussed above, and possible links to related posts.

Stack Overflow

Knowledge Base Community

The legendary Q&A platform that defined developer collaboration for a decade, now facing a transition in the AI era.

Visit Stack Overflow

Agentic AI IDEs

Future of Work Automation

Modern development environments like Antigravity that use autonomous agents to write, debug, and refactor code directly.

ChatGPT

Disruptor AI Chat

The tool that changed everything, moving developers from searching for answers to synthesizing them instantly.