Stack Overflow questions per year

Sometime around 2015, American programmers began asking fewer questions on Stack Overflow each year, and American diners began ordering more pizza each year, and the two curves have been heading in opposite directions (r = -0.960) with the steady purpose of a divorce. One category asked 'why is my code broken'; the other answered 'thirty minutes or it's free.' Neither is obviously the other's cause; both are obviously 2015 onward.

The Stack Overflow decline has a crisp explanation — GitHub Copilot and then ChatGPT hoovered up the questions that used to go to forums, with new question volume dropping by more than half between 2017 and 2023 as developers began asking models instead of strangers. Pizza restaurant spending, meanwhile, climbed past $46 billion in the US, juiced by DoorDash, delivery fees, ghost kitchens, and pandemic habits that refused to unform. Both are stories about the reshuffling of service labor: the senior developer and the pizza courier both found their jobs mediated by apps between 2015 and 2023, just with very different outcomes.

The answers moved to the model; the pizza moved to the door. Something delivered, either way.