Death by LLM
Runneth Over
The demise of Stack Overflow
Stack Overflow page views
For years Stack Overflow was the go-to place for developers to get help with tricky coding problems. Many are now turning to code-writing AI assistants instead, such as Cursor or Microsoft’s Github Copilot. Two-fifths of coders say they use such tools. According to Similarweb, a data provider, Stack Overflow’s monthly internet traffic has fallen by around half over the past two years.
Last year the company went through two rounds of layoffs, firing about a third of its total workforce. “Death by LLM,” is how Elon Musk described the company’s fate on X, the social media-site he owns, referring to the large language models that generative AI is built with.
Code dependent
Questions asked, per month
Looking at questions asked over time, a few things stand out:
- 2014: questions started to decline, which was also when Stack Overflow significantly improved moderator efficiency. From then, questions were closed faster, many more were closed, and “low quality” questions were removed more efficiently. This tallies with my memory of feeling that site moderators had gone on a power trip by closing legitimate questions. I stopped asking questions around this time because the site felt unwelcome.
- March 2020: a large spike in traffic due to pandemic-related lockdowns and forced remote working. Stuck at home, devs Googled and visited Stack Overflow for help more often.
- June 2020: questions start to decline, faster than before. Even though we didn't know at the time, this was still two years away from ChatGPT launching!
- June 2021: Stack Overflow sold for $1.8B to private equity investor, Prosus. In hindsight, founders Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky sold with near-perfect timing, before terminal decline.
- November 2022: as soon as ChatGPT came out, the number of questions asked declined rapidly. ChatGPT is faster and it’s trained on StackOverflow data, so the quality of answers is similar. Plus, ChatGPT is polite and answers all questions, in contrast to StackOverflow moderators.
- May 2025: the number of monthly questions asked is as low as when Stack Overflow launched in 2009.