"If it would go away tomorrow, I wouldn't even notice it": is there a future for Stack Overflow in software engineering?

Over the span of three decades, Stack Overflow has been a fixture in the software engineering landscape – guiding developers of all experience levels through their thorny programming queries. Such was its significance that it featured more than 250,000 monthly queries at its peak in the mid-2010s. It was also acquired in 2021 for a staggering $1.8 billion by the Dutch company Prosus.

Since then, however, the traffic has fallen away, with a viral graphic showing the number of monthly queries beginning to collapse between the end of 2022 and the start of 2023 – coinciding with the public debut of ChatGPT. Since then, traffic to the site has evaporated, with just 2,640 queries registered in the month of January 2026. Does this mean the platform is "dead" as many commentators have been musing?

The answer depends on who you ask: the company's CEO, Prashanth Chandrasekar, insists the business is fundamentally different to the one developers used frequently in the middle of the last decade. For many individual developers, the recent AI pivot by the company, outlined in coverage by ITPro last year and a blog post that Chandrasekar shared, is unconvincing. The software world, as far as they're concerned, has moved on from it almost entirely, deeming it more of an archival resource.

But such an iconic and once essential platform surely won't vanish without leaving its mark in this AI-laden development landscape. Is it game over for Stack Overflow in 2026? Or, to borrow a famous saying, are the rumours of its death greatly exaggerated?

The changing face of software development

"Stack is far from dead," Chandrasekar tells ITPro. "While we know many who have announced this in public are referencing a chart they’ve seen online regarding a decline in questions and answers on our public platform, very few of them know the reality of our business. Many only know us for the Q&A element of our business, and while this format is fantastic for high-quality, curated knowledge, it does not always enable certain types of conversations or address new ways people learn or collaborate."

Although Chandrasekar insists there is life in the old dog yet, two developers tell with ITPro how Stack Overflow has changed over the years – not for the better – with the rise of AI being something of a death knell.

Vincent Schmalbach, a freelance software developer and AI engineer, says he hasn't been on Stack Overflow for at least a month at the time of our interview. "Before AI, I was on Stack Overflow 10 times a day. I'm not exaggerating. This is what software development looked like. You Google a problem, Google shows you Stack Overflow, you click through," he explains – adding that when he now Googles something, "I usually just read the AI overview".

"When I do click through to an actual website, it's usually GitHub Issues, not Stack Overflow. That's where discussions between software developers happen now. If you have a problem with a specific library or package, the developers of that library discuss things in GitHub Issues. That's a first-party source. Plus, reading the official documentation, or rather pasting it into the AI instead of reading through it myself."

Behnam Bastani is the CEO and founder of OpenInfer, an AI edge computing company. With more than 20 years of development experience, he was previously director of engineering for AI and machine learning at Roblox and Meta – and says he's shipped AI engines at scale at various big tech companies. He says his engineering teams have been shifting entirely to integrated development environment (IDE) first workflows, where the primary interaction happens with some form of chatbot or localized inference model. "Engineers only visit Stack Overflow for esoteric, low-level debugging where human debate provides context that models might hallucinate," he says. "Reaching for a web forum now feels like a last resort rather than the natural starting point for problem-solving."

AI is to blame, but there's so much more to the story

Although AI is the primary accelerator for Stack Overflow's so-called demise, Bastani says, it was already deteriorating from what many developers call "community entropy". He defines this as "years of gatekeeping and moderator friction that drove developers away."

"Overflow always has had issues with moderation and people getting their questions closed for no reason," adds Schmalbach. "But that's just how crowdsourced platforms work. Wikipedia has similar problems. People accepted it and kept using the site anyway."

Gergely Orosz, author of the Pragmatic Engineer blog, commented on a similar trend in a 2025 blog post. "Even without LLMs," he said, "it’s possible StackOverflow would have eventually faded into irrelevance – perhaps driven by moderation policy changes or something else that started in 2014."

But those issues weren't ever terminal and don't speak to the cataclysmic usage drop the site has sustained in recent months: "What killed Stack Overflow is AI, plain and simple," Schmalbach decrees, a characterization that Chandrasekar would of course reject.

Unlike Bastani and Schmalbach's irrelevance, Orost comes across as full of lament. "I'll certainly miss having a space on the internet to ask questions and receive help – not from an AI, but from fellow, human developers," he added. "While Stack Overflow's days are likely numbered: I'm sure we'll see spaces where developers hang out and help each other continue to be popular – whether they are in the form of Discord servers, WhatsApp or Telegram groups, or something else.

What role will Stack Overflow play in 2026 and beyond?

While Chandrasekar concedes that the way developers seek answers to their queries has shifted, he sees a future beyond the site's original purpose and insists it's evolving with the times. "We believe the new measures of value in the post-GenAI era are reach, trust, attribution, and influence," he tells ITPro. "Stack Overflow provides that layer of context and trust for developers – whether through our enterprise product Stack Internal used by engineering teams at over 25,000 organizations globally, or via the depth and reach of our data partnerships with leading LLM developers and hyperscalers, including Google Cloud, OpenAI, and Microsoft."

For Stack Overflow, the purpose is to shift to new forms of content "that generate more conversation" alongside "investing in new GenAI tools". Chandrasekar also points out that many developers technically use Stack Overflow without realizing, albeit indirectly, through the licensing partnerships with the purveyors of AI as well as within marketplaces via the likes of Snowflake, Databricks and Moveworks, among many others.

"Developers or anyone seeking out information online no longer looks in one place – that’s not how our media and tech ecosystem operates anymore. Beyond the public platform, Stack Overflow has evolved into a larger ecosystem residing inside enterprises which is also useful as AI Agents depend on context to unlock their potential. None of this can be captured by a single Q&A chart."

Schmalbach is brutal in his assessment of the platform's future, saying: "Stack Overflow's biggest value now is as training data for the AI. If it would go away tomorrow, I wouldn't even notice it."

But Bastani is more charitable, predicting it "will become the "gold standard" archive for human-verified logic" rather than a daily destination. "As the web floods with AI-generated content, the industry desperately needs repositories where humans verify the correctness of AI-proposed architectures," he says. "It will serve as critical "ground truth" to prevent model collapse, the recursive degradation that occurs when AI trains on its own unverified output. The platform is evolving from a public help desk to a specialized data provenance layer for high-stakes software engineering."

That's a core message that Chandrasekar wants to stress. "We believe the new measures of value in the post-GenAI era are reach, trust, attribution, and influence. Stack Overflow provides that layer of context and trust for developers."

For our experts, there will certainly be some kind of future for the platform, even if they disagree on the exact nature of that. What’s apparent is that this will center around how it can align with and co-exist alongside a flood of generative AI systems that are now augmenting development.

This also signals a wider shift with the nature of software development – and the way that individual engineers perform their daily tasks. Rather than using tools like Google Search and Stack Overflow, AI is becoming far more proficient at assisting developers and responding to queries. Extrapolating this further, we might begin to see teams of developers managing and overseeing vast amounts of code generated by AI, with conventional writing replaced by curation and editing, rather than getting stuck in themselves.

As for problem-solving, Schmalbach envisages different ways of online engagement and relationship-building beyond forums like Stack Overflow. "I think that the good old blogs will come back," he says, with people likely to visit posts written by human developers about problems that AI can't yet solve. Given the pace at which AI is improving, however, it remains to be seen how long even this form of engagement might last.