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
Also depends on your level of expertise. If you have beginner questions, an LLM should give you the correct answer most of the time. If you’re an expert, your questions have no answers. Usually, it’s something like an obscure firmware bug edge case even the manufacturer isn’t aware of. Good luck troubleshooting that without writing your own drivers and libraries.
If you’re writing cutting edge shit, then LLM is probably at best a rubber duck for talking things through. Then there are tons of programmers where the job is to translate business requirements into bog standard code over and over and over.
Nothing about my job is novel except the contortions demanded by the customer — and whatever the current trendy JS framework is to try to beat it into a real language. But I am reasonably good at what I do, having done it for thirty years.
Yeah the internet seems to think coding is an expert thing when 99.9% of coders do exactly what you described. I do it, you do it, everybody does it. Even the people claiming to do big boy coding, when you really look at the details, they’re mostly slapping bog standard code on business needs.
Boring standard coding is exactly where you can actually let the LLM write the code. Manual intervention and review is still required, but at least you can speed up the process.
Yeah but in that edge case SO wouldn’t help either even before the current crash. Unless you were lucky. I find LLM useful to push me in the right direction when I’m stuck and documentation isn’t helping either not necessarily to give me perfectly written code. It’s like pair programming with someone who isn’t a coder but somehow has read all the documentation and programming books. Sometimes the left field suggestions it makes are quite helpful.
I’ve found some interesting and even good new functions by moaning my code woes to an LLM. Also, it has taken me on some pointless wild goose chases too, so you better watch out. Any suggestion has the potential to be anywhere from absolutely brilliant to a completely stupid waste of time.
Also depends on your level of expertise. If you have beginner questions, an LLM should give you the correct answer most of the time. If you’re an expert, your questions have no answers. Usually, it’s something like an obscure firmware bug edge case even the manufacturer isn’t aware of. Good luck troubleshooting that without writing your own drivers and libraries.
If you’re writing cutting edge shit, then LLM is probably at best a rubber duck for talking things through. Then there are tons of programmers where the job is to translate business requirements into bog standard code over and over and over.
Nothing about my job is novel except the contortions demanded by the customer — and whatever the current trendy JS framework is to try to beat it into a real language. But I am reasonably good at what I do, having done it for thirty years.
Yeah the internet seems to think coding is an expert thing when 99.9% of coders do exactly what you described. I do it, you do it, everybody does it. Even the people claiming to do big boy coding, when you really look at the details, they’re mostly slapping bog standard code on business needs.
Boring standard coding is exactly where you can actually let the LLM write the code. Manual intervention and review is still required, but at least you can speed up the process.
Yeah but in that edge case SO wouldn’t help either even before the current crash. Unless you were lucky. I find LLM useful to push me in the right direction when I’m stuck and documentation isn’t helping either not necessarily to give me perfectly written code. It’s like pair programming with someone who isn’t a coder but somehow has read all the documentation and programming books. Sometimes the left field suggestions it makes are quite helpful.
I’ve found some interesting and even good new functions by moaning my code woes to an LLM. Also, it has taken me on some pointless wild goose chases too, so you better watch out. Any suggestion has the potential to be anywhere from absolutely brilliant to a completely stupid waste of time.