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:
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.
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:
