StackOverflow, the most commonly used platform by software developers for programming support, has been through a rough ride lately. Despite an impressive 69% of questions answered, StackOverflow’s traffic has been in decline. Similarweb’s data shows that their traffic dropped 14% year over year (StackOverflow says it’s closer to 5%). Nevertheless, the trend is downward and is explained primarily by the emergence of AI coding products like ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot. These products have meaningful code-writing capabilities and are, therefore, able to provide programming support, at least partly as good as StackOverflow does. Ironically, several of the large language models (LLMs) behind these AI products were trained using scraped StackOverflow data.
The company has gotten pretty harsh media coverage with these developments. Business Insider, in their article Death by LLM, wrote: