What happened
Stack Overflow announced a 28% workforce reduction in April 2025, two years after its Prosus acquisition. The stated reason: AI tooling has reduced question volume by 35% since ChatGPT launched.
The underlying shift
Developers are getting answers from LLMs faster than posting to Stack Overflow. The questions that remain are more obscure, more specific, and less likely to get authoritative answers quickly.
What this means
- The canonical Q&A model for developer help is weakening
- The value of structured, human-curated knowledge is shifting to LLM training sets
- The economic model that sustained it (job listings + Teams SaaS) relied on search traffic that is declining
What does not change
Stack Overflow's corpus is still the best-curated source of programming knowledge. It is being consumed by LLMs, not replaced by them.