Stack Overflow questions per year

Between 2015 and 2022, humanity launched more rockets into space and asked fewer coding questions on Stack Overflow, and the inverse correlation (r = -0.959) tells a particular story about where human ingenuity relocated itself. The rocket ascends; the forum thins. The payload, increasingly, is not in need of a senior developer's patient reply.

FAA-licensed commercial space launches grew from 9 in 2015 to over 87 in 2022, a near-10x jump almost entirely due to SpaceX's Falcon 9 cadence and the secondary market of smaller launch providers. Stack Overflow new-question volume, meanwhile, declined by more than 50% over the same window, with an especially sharp fall after ChatGPT's late-2022 release. The connection is a kind of industrialization: what used to require a human expert's attention — orbital insertion, regex help — became routine, handled by automated systems that iterate cheaply. The frontier moved; so did the labor. The specific year these two crossed, it turns out, was 2018 for launches and 2019 for questions.

Rockets depart. Questions evaporate. The expert labor for both has been reorganized without being consulted.