Stack Overflow questions per year

It is a curious fact, and one that ought to concern us more than it apparently does, that as SpaceX has learned to launch rockets with increasing confidence, the internet has collectively forgotten how to ask questions about programming. One might have expected these to move in opposite directions, or indeed to have no relationship whatsoever, yet here we are with a correlation so strong it feels like a practical joke the universe is playing on pattern-recognition itself. The more Elon Musk reaches for the stars, the fewer times Stack Overflow users reach for their keyboards.

The explanation, I suspect, has less to do with cosmic irony and more to do with the fact that both trends are being pulled by the same invisible thread: the maturing of software development as a discipline. As machine learning and automated code completion have improved—particularly between 2017 and 2023—programmers have needed to ask fewer basic questions online; meanwhile, SpaceX's reusable rocket technology eliminated the need to solve launch engineering problems from scratch each time, allowing them to launch more frequently with fewer novel obstacles. It's rather like watching a student slowly build from needing help with every algebra problem to solving most of them alone, except the student is humanity and the subject is 'how to leave the planet.' Between 2015 and 2023, Stack Overflow questions dropped from roughly 13,000 per day to 9,000, while SpaceX went from 6 launches annually to 28.

What we're witnessing, then, is not so much a cosmic conspiracy as the ordinary, slightly mundane process of two different human endeavors becoming better at what they do—and in becoming better, requiring less public fumbling. The correlation is real, the causation is probably obvious once you've thought about it for thirty seconds, and yet we all stood there staring at these numbers as if they'd revealed something profound about the nature of rockets and stack traces. Perhaps that's the real pattern worth noticing here.