Questions Humans Still Ask
New Stack Overflow questions per month. Stack Overflow question volume peaked long before generative AI. It separates the long decline of a human knowledge market from the later arrival of generative AI.
What does it show?
Stack Overflow question volume peaked long before generative AI.
Methodology
Calls the official Stack Exchange /questions endpoint once per complete calendar month with Stack Overflow as the site and retains only the returned total. No question text, tags, users, or row-level records are stored. Complete months are cached to respect the API quota. This measures questions submitted to one platform, not all programming work or information seeking. Stack Overflow volume was already declining before late 2022; the 2023 moderation strike and subsequent AI-content policy changes are additional structural breaks, so the post-2022 movement cannot be attributed to generative AI alone. What this isn't: The post-2022 period should be read as a possible change in an already-declining information market, not the start of the decline.