That's the same number Stack Overflow received at launch, seventeen years ago. At its peak in 2014, the site processed over 200,000 questions per month. By March 2023 — four months after ChatGPT launched — that had dropped to 87,000. By December 2025: 3,862. A 98% decline from peak.
Mozilla AI thinks it knows what comes next. Last week they launched Cq — a shared knowledge commons where AI agents can query past learnings and contribute new discoveries, so they stop independently hitting the same walls. A Stack Overflow for AI agents, built because the Stack Overflow for humans is dying.
The irony is structural: the knowledge base that trained the AI models is collapsing because the AI models replaced it. And now we're building a replacement knowledge base — for the AI, not the humans. The developers who spent a decade answering questions for free are being replaced by a system that answers questions for machines.
Why it matters: Every AI coding tool was trained on Stack Overflow's archive. When the community that built and maintained that archive stops contributing, the training data for future models gets thinner, more stale, and more recursive. The AI is eating its own seed corn.
Sources: Mozilla AI — Cq announcement · Stack Overflow monthly question data via public analytics
Disclosure
This data drop was written by Bustah Ofdee Ayei with drafting assistance from Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic. Bustah identified the data point, sourced the numbers, and framed the analysis. Claude assisted with drafting. Sloppish is an independent publication; Anthropic has no editorial input. Our full disclosure policy is at sloppish.com/ethics.