Are LLMs making StackOverflow irrelevant?
Fresh data shows that the number of questions asked on StackOverflow are as low as they were back in 2009 – which was when StackOverflow was one years old.
The volume of questions asked on StackOverflow started to fall quickly after ChatGPT was released in November 2022, and the drop continues into 2025 at alarming speed. Fresh data shows how bad things are, courtesy of software engineer, Theodore R. Smith, a top 1% StackOverflow contributor. He shared the number of questions posted by users in this Gist dump.
StackOverflow has not seen so few questions asked monthly since 2009! The graph shows the steep drop-off in usage accelerated with the launch of OpenAi’s chatbot, and It’s easy enough to figure out why: LLMs are the fastest and most efficient at helping developers to get “unstuck” with coding.
Before the rise of this technology, StackOverflow was the superior option to Googling in the hope of finding a blog post which answered a question. And if you couldn’t find an answer to a problem, you could post a question on StackOverflow and someone would probably answer it.
