Yep, SO was dying before the GPTs - in some ways it was baked in the original SO design - to become the canonical source of information about programming stuff.

Many people talk about the negativity, and they are right, but I think the reason more than anything is the waiting. On SO a good question might get answered in minutes (if it was easy and someone was karma farming) but it could be days or weeks for general purpose stuff; compare that to a few seconds for an LLM its a no brainer.

The decline you're talking about is roughly 168 to 145, or about 2.2% per year over 5 years.

That's hardly a death sentence. More likely just the gradual adoption of higher level frameworks and languages with less ugly parts.

Indeed, decline appears to accelerate significantly in 2023 so seems likely that's AI helping things along.

The trend might've stalled or even reversed if it weren't for AI, we can't just assume the same end was written in stone.