AI finished off Stack Overflow: under 1,000 questions a month
Stack Overflow got fewer than a thousand new questions in October 2026. At its peak that number was about 200,000 a month.
Almost nobody asks new questions on Stack Overflow anymore. Open platform stats show 1,019 new questions in August 2026, 969 in September, and only 808 so far in October. At the 2014 peak the site got about 200,000 questions a month. By late 2025 that had already fallen to 3-4 thousand.
The numbers hit Hacker News last night and blew up within hours. Hundreds of points, hundreds of comments. The shared takeaway: the decline started before ChatGPT, around 2017, but AI finished the job. People ask Claude, ChatGPT or Copilot and skip waiting for a moderator to close the post as a duplicate.
Stack Overflow itself turned off parts of its auto-deletion machinery in October. The RemoveDeadQuestions and RemoveAbandonedQuestions scripts no longer clean the feed the old way. The October 9 notice barely registered. The chart with under a thousand monthly questions did.
The forum once had more than 50 million unique monthly users. New question volume is now below what it saw in its first months in 2008. The answer archive is still there. A living community around new questions basically is not.