Stack Overflow is becoming an archaeological layer.
Look at the chart of monthly questions. It rises with the web, peaks and then drops off a cliff.
In 2014, developers posted over 200,000 questions a month. In December 2025, it was 3,862. That is about a 98% collapse from the peak.
We have not stopped writing code. We have stopped asking each other for help in public.
When a junior developer gets stuck on a regex problem, they don’t post it to a forum and wait three hours to be told their question is a duplicate. They paste it into Claude or Cursor and get the fix in three seconds.
The short-term win is massive productivity. The long-term risk is the poisoning of the training data well.
If the public square where humans hash out technical reality goes dark, what do the next generation of models learn from? Yesterday’s answers.
