This was my thought as well.

A friend of mine recently left a senior role, largely b/c of frustration with the firehose of junior AI-slop pull requests.

The majority of ads I see on YouTube these days are AI-slop deepfake celebrity endorsements, obviously-fake (and dangerous) medical scams, weight-loss salts, workout plans, etc. etc. I don't see anything in the CEO statement about that.

The "monthly question volume has collapsed [to] about 300" appears to be an artifact of the last category being the current month, January 2026, even though we're only in the 5th day as of this posting. (Specifically, 321 as of Jan-5 @ 10:30 AM EDT). I expect the number will be in the 2,000+ range by the end of the month, matching both recent trends and a simple extrapolation from the first few days. (Which would still be the worst full month on record.)

This is my take as well.

"Maybe everyone's just practicing their language skills with ChatGPT?"

Or: Maybe no one's practicing any skills whatsoever anymore, because they expect answers will always be available on-demand via ChatGPT (et. al.)

My limited sample: I have 3 long-time engineering friends currently looking for jobs, and they've all been asked to use AI tools of some sort in all of their recent interviews.

Weirdly, most of those cases have sprung the requirement on the person by surprise midway into the interview.

You sound like one of the misinformation spigots that are cheesed you can't get traction on Bluesky.

I access Bluesky on the Firefox browser on my Android-based phone.

Listen to Jeff Bezos' Washington Post and Trump's Wharton School.

If you're a right-winger, it's a terrible place to be. Don't come!

I was a senior software engineer (now a CS professor), and I never touch-typed, and it never held me back.

The work of the programmer/engineer is what, 95% mental work, 5% typing? (to be generous to the latter) That's without even getting into rapidly-changing input techniques, autocomplete in the IDE, etc.

Anecdote: When I got my first engineering job in the 90's, I vented my frustration to my father, "The guy in the next cubicle is like 100 times more productive than me" (comparing a day-1 out of college programmer to a senior codebase expert who was indeed one those x100 engineers). My father's response was, "Well, he must be a much faster typist than you are", and it was all I could do to not laugh or choke on such a ridiculous misunderstanding of the job. Consider the degree to which that's a relevant assessment.

A few weeks SO staff posted a "we're rebranding" post on the site in the Q&A format. They've been throwing out all kinds of supposed strategic expansions lately, which look scattered and less than coherent.This particular post generated comments and the CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar started responding.

Observation: The CEO (unfiltered by editors, legal, or PR) can barely write a coherent English sentence. They're not making any sense at all with their current plans, as far as I can tell. Their goose is probably cooked. Remember when Slashdot came off its peak and was sold and shuffled around a couple times by corporations grasping for some way to leverage its former popularity? Like that.

https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/408825/341383

I personally have a lot of white and Asian community-college students who can't do basic algebra.

Since 1866, New York State has had a standardized testing regime at the end of high school to qualify for a statewide Regents Diploma. Since at least 2015, they likewise goose the scores in a broadly similar way. You can see a scoring conversion chart from last year here. For example, out of 82 possible points on the Algebra I test, scoring 29 (that is, 35%) gets scaled up to a reported score of 65, qualifying for performance level 3 (out of 5, like a 'C'), and so qualifies for the Regents Diploma (more).

In the time since that's been done, the proficiency of basic math skills for incoming college students has become so poor, the colleges (like CUNY) have had to abandon the requirement to know any algebra even as an expectation to graduate college.

I've said for quite some time that an essential problem with SO is that, since people are incited to score points, they want that to come easy, and so they get irritable when there's a fundamentally hard question that gets asked. Hence the downgrading and looking for reasons to close or delete a question. Which especially sucks for high-knowledge question-askers who have already thought through, researched, and ruled out any easy solutions.

The Iron Law of Stack Exchange

He's "seen the future" here as much as he did with the $100B+ pile of cash he lit on fire in pursuit of VR.

I'm really surprised that the default reception to this story is to actually believe what the company reps are saying after the fact. It seems like a very weird coincidence:

(1) Help bot gives very specific one-device policy.
(2) Separate login system simultaneously shuts people out of multiple devices.

To me it seems like a high, possibly more-likely possibility, is that the company did change the policy behind the scenes, and then when backlash and cancelled subscriptions started happening, backtracked -- reversed the policy and claimed AI communication was to blame. I mean, it's not like the AI bot can defend itself in this regard. And the company already seems on the sleazy side, e.g., not labeling help chat as AI-based.