The number of questions on Stack Overflow fell by 78 percent in December 2025 compared to a year earlier. Developers are switching en masse to AI tools in
What we’re all afraid is that cheap slop is going to make stack broke/close/bought/private and then it will be removed from the public domain…then jack up the price of islop when the alternative is gone…
I do wonder then, as new languages and tools are developed, how quickly will AI models be able to parrot information on their use, if sources like stackoverflow cease to exist.
It’ll certainly be of lesser quality even if they go through steps to make it able to address it.
good documentation and open projects ported might be enough to give you working code, but it’s not going to be able to optimize it without being trained on tons of optimization data.
There are open weight models that users can download and run locally. Because the weights are open, they can be customised and fine tuned.
And then there are fully open source models, that publish everything, the model with open weights, the training source code, as well as the full training dataset.
What we’re all afraid is that cheap slop is going to make stack broke/close/bought/private and then it will be removed from the public domain…then jack up the price of islop when the alternative is gone…
I do wonder then, as new languages and tools are developed, how quickly will AI models be able to parrot information on their use, if sources like stackoverflow cease to exist.
I think this is a classic of privatization of commons, so that nobody can compete with them later without free public datasets…
It’ll certainly be of lesser quality even if they go through steps to make it able to address it.
good documentation and open projects ported might be enough to give you working code, but it’s not going to be able to optimize it without being trained on tons of optimization data.
There are free open source models you can run locally and they have all the answers.
But can anyone train on them? What happens to the original dataset?
There are open weight models that users can download and run locally. Because the weights are open, they can be customised and fine tuned.
And then there are fully open source models, that publish everything, the model with open weights, the training source code, as well as the full training dataset.