The number of questions on Stack Overflow fell by 78 percent in December 2025 compared to a year earlier. Developers are switching en masse to AI tools in their IDEs, making the popular developer forum increasingly irrelevant.
The number of questions on Stack Overflow fell by 78 percent in December 2025 compared to a year earlier. Developers are switching en masse to AI tools in their IDEs, making the popular developer forum increasingly irrelevant.
Question… what were all those AI tools in IDEs trained on?..
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Well, they used to be trained on Stack Overflow.
In the future they’ll be trained on all your code, as per the end user licence agreement you clicked through.
Yeah, good luck fixing issues with “intelligence” based on MY code.
How valuable will all of that code be without the context added by human conversation emphasizing and explaining aspects of code?
Sure, this will work for programming languages that are unchanging and dead, but as people begin to need to learn new aspects of programming language this system will spectacularly fail. AI does not beat high quality human conversations about a technical topic, it can only badly summarize them.
Yeah, either trained on or they do a web search when you ask them knowledge questions. Gonna be an interesting one, when all the actual knowledge sources have disappeared.