Stack Overflow questions per year

As Novo Nordisk's semaglutide revenue has surged, the annual volume of programming questions posted to Stack Overflow has collapsed, producing an inverse correlation of -0.997 across six years that looks, at first glance, like weight-loss drugs are killing software questions. They are not. Something else is, and it has a chatbot.

Novo Nordisk's semaglutide revenue climbed from almost nothing in 2018 to over $25 billion by 2023, as Ozempic and Wegovy became the defining pharmaceutical story of the early 2020s. Stack Overflow questions, meanwhile, fell sharply over the same period, declining roughly 30-50% from their late-2010s peak as developers increasingly routed their questions to LLM-based tools like ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot, which eliminated the need for public forum debugging. The two trends are mechanistically unrelated, but both crossed critical inflection points in late 2022 — one a GLP-1 cultural breakout, the other an LLM-driven collapse in forum traffic — within weeks of each other. The shared variable is simply the same transformative six months.

An inverse correlation this tight across six years can describe two separate revolutions sharing the same calendar. The injection and the chatbot showed up together. Neither noticed the other arriving.