[panstromek]

Doesn't feel like the AI is the main driver. Many things changed over time - dev tools got better, editors got smarter, compilers got better error messages, various primary resources improved, tutorial websites, courses and youtube boomed.

Another point of course is that each new question is more and more likely to be already answered. At some point the site pretty much covers most of what is to be answered.

[jayflux]

One aspect I haven’t seen anyone mention contributing to the decline is GitHub (part of your “improved tooling”)

These days you can go to the repo and there’s usually already an issue open with the problem and a workaround. Or if someone has a question on how to use the tool/software they ask there.

Before GH boomed it was often SO doing this job.

[makeitdouble]

It could be the most impacting aspect IMHO.

This, and first party developer forums. iOS questions will go directly to Apple's community forums. Same for SalesForce, or Elastic search etc.

There's just a higher noise/signal ratio, a real chance to get answers from experts, and it makes for a stepping stone if the issues needs to be bumped to paid support.

[imglorp]

> each new question is more and more likely to be already answered

Yeah, except for when there should be current answers. Most of computing is in constant flux. There's a mountain of 10+ year old answers that simply don't apply any more.

[zahlman]

> except for when there should be current answers.

Yes.

They belong on the existing question - unless the existing question is poorly asked and the new one is better asked.

New answers can, by default, be added at any time - and should, if existing answers are actually out of date rather than simply being old. (Many 10+ year old answers really do still apply.)

Asking the question again is not how the site is designed or intended to work.

[ahofmann]

I answered one question 13 years ago where I still gets points for. Computing as a whole isn't so much in constant flux, it is only JavaScript that changes so much. Hell, I learned to use Apache 30 years ago, and I didn't need to learn anything new the last 25 years of that.

[zahlman]

The change to Python 3 effectively either invalidated or deprecated tons of Python questions, or else required new answers to be written. In many cases we ended up with an annoying pair of popular questions to capture major 2->3 differences, because you'd get clueless users who thought they were running a 2.x interpreter but were actually running a 3.x interpreter, and also the other way around.

[zahlman]

There was a noticeable inflection in the question-rate-vs-time curve around the time that ChatGPT was released.

Which is fine. If your question is not answered by `site:stackoverflow.com how to do the thing` but it is answered by an LLM taking `how do I do the thing?` as a prompt and synthezising existing Stack Overflow content, that is inherently not a suitable Stack Overflow question. Because anyone else could put `how do I do the thing?` into the same LLM. It's not any different from using a traditional search engine.

(And when the LLM fails by producing a wrong synthesis, then blessing that result by putting it on Stack Overflow is actively harmful - which is why it's banned by policy.)

[nthingtohide]

> Another point of course is that each new question is more and more likely to be already answered. At some point the site pretty much covers most of what is to be answered.

AI has the ability combine answers from multiple sources and tailor-make to your exact prompt details. Now that is something we call glove fits the hand. Plus it can explain its answers.

[ashirviskas]

Yes, it can combine multiple sources and make up an answer that makes no sense. Even if it explains how "it works", it does not help when the API or a function has never existed.