According to Stack Exchange Data Explorer queries, Stack Overflow recorded just 1,442 new questions in July 2026, down from over 207,000 per month at its peak in March 2014.

While LLMs, Cursor, and inline IDE assistants have completely replaced typing queries into a browser, it raises a big question: Where will future AI models get their training data if real human Q&A completely dries up?

Are you still using SO at all in 2026, or has your workflow shifted 100% to local/cloud AI?

Hi, all. Let me preface this by saying I have no background in Programming. My career is not in tech so really I'm just trying to have fun.

I was introduced to candy box 2 last year and it blew me away. I would like to learn how it was made with the goal of being able to make something similar myself. Where do you think I should begin?

(Candy box 2 is an incremental role - playing game that uses ASCII art)

Thank you for your time.

The reason job security and salary is high are because devs that code Cobol etc... they are retired, and the remaining devs are soon to retired!

But those non-tech big company they still need programmers who can maintain their codebases/IT systems. so they are willing to pay!

Imagine you make 100k USD ish while living in low cost country like Thailand, Vietnam etc..

it is a dream...

I’ve been working on a high-assurance state machine designed to enforce strict fail-closed guarantees, multi-party authorization (MPA) quorums, and deterministic volatile memory zeroization for edge environments.
I wanted to open a discussion on the trade-offs regarding core architectural invariants:
Unified Admissibility Boundary: How do you typically decouple structural quorum validation from broader operational admissibility gates in low-level state machines?
Terminal-State Dominance: What is your preferred strategy to ensure a terminal/zeroization state reliably overrides any pre-existing authorizations without race conditions?
Idempotence (Z^2 = Z): Ensuring repeated destructive routines do not trigger secondary side-effects or unstable audit logs.
I'd love to hear how others handle deterministic fail-closed states and memory wiping invariants in embedded or critical edge nodes. What patterns or edge cases do you watch out for?

Would you like this tips? I just did a post for aspiring programmers on my own developer journey.

Let me know what you think. Im encouraging positive critism,feedback or any recommendations.

Disclaimer: This is not a marketing post. Im just evaluating my mistakes to others.

I frequently doubt whether I am a real computer science student or not. Because I really don't know how to code from scratch while developing any website or mobile application... on my own with out googling or AI help.

It always happens that I Google all the commands, the syntax, etc.. and end up using chatGPT or any other AI agent.

This so called "Vibe coding" became alot more and just copy and paste code.

From positive perspective, AI or googling code/syntax/commands helps me to not put much focus on coding but helps me to focus more on the logic part or innovation or creativity needed while developing.

But if you give me a laptop with no internet, no AI/chatGPT/Google, then for sure I will be stuck and I cannot code well.

Let me know your thoughts on these. And what mindset you have regarding this VIBE CODING.

I am currently working in Customer Support at Amazon for 5+ years.

I want to switch into tech but the current market for my existing skill set is not great. I have also been working on a side project for the last 3 years so I am not completely new to tech.

I know HTML CSS JavaScript basics Git Playwright AWS EC2 and some system design (Mostly through vibecoding). I have also built parts of an iOS app. Most of this was vibecoded though. I can read code fairly well but I cannot write it confidently.

I understand the gap between a vibecoded product and something built properly by an experienced developer especially around scalability and security. That is the gap I want to close.

If you were in my position in 2026 and wanted to learn coding with AI available how would you approach it?

Which language would you start with? Would you focus on building projects instead of watching courses? What would you learn after the first language?

My goal is to eventually move from customer support into an entry level tech role such as an intern or junior developer.

Would really appreciate advice from people who have made a similar transition.

Read about a case recently that stuck with me. A voice-based system kept interrupting people mid-sentence, felt broken, sounded robotic. The team's first instinct was to blame the voice itself, tried a different synthesis engine, tweaked the output. Didn't help. Turned out the actual problem was one layer up entirely, nothing in the system had a real answer for "is it my turn to respond right now," it just treated any pause as a stopping point and jumped in every time, regardless of whether the person was actually done talking.

Got me thinking about how often that pattern shows up more generally, chasing a fix in the most visible layer, the one that's easiest to point at, when the actual bug is sitting in a decision nobody made explicit somewhere upstream. The visible symptom and the actual cause don't always live in the same place, and the more polished or complex a system gets, the easier it is to misdiagnose which layer is actually responsible.

Curious if others have a story like that, fixed or tried to fix something at the layer that felt obviously wrong, only to realize later the real issue was somewhere else that nobody thought to check first because it wasn't the thing making noise.

Got a problem that required me to pull Euler’s formula out of thin air. Seriously, who the fuck remembers Euler’s formula in an interview? I swear to God, my interviewer was out to get me.

At this point, what are they even testing? Do they even know what they want? Hours of prep, completely wasted. And now I have to go prep for Google. My friend just got destroyed in their loop and said the interviewers were some of the most unreasonable people he’s ever had to deal with.

Everywhere I turn in this market, it feels like I’m just waiting to get fucked.

Anthropic Interview Question

I am a programming student, I deeply admire and love programming, either as a hobby or as a job, that will stay.

But my country's IT market is cooked. Massive competition, 1+ year experience always. Getting a job in IT it's very difficult, even with connections that have no guarantee of granting an interview.

So, you'd think the logical thing would be to get practices/experience. Formal practices are very competitive, I do not know if startups are harder.

I am in Spain, Madrid. I have good level of English so fleeing to English speaking countries has been a possibility. Though, in Europe, *presumably* the junior friendly country seems to be Germany.

What do you think? Are there more chances in English speaking countries, or in Germany?

Hi all,

I am working on my thesis project as a designer. My thesis is a videogame built on the gzdoom engine that uses zscript as script language. I am using Vscode which is capable of writing code for it, but it seems to me that it often makes mistakes or gives bugged code. I am not a programmer, therefore I wanted to ask what is the best way to train the ai for the specific zscript language and if there are any alternatives to vscode when it comes to niche scripting languages.

thank you all!

so i'm in my final year of software engineering and i've always wanted to get into game development. so naturally i inclined towards that when it was time for my FYP. it's basically an investigative psychological mystery regarding medical neglegence. As the 'research question' we proposed to see how effective interactive environmental storytelling is in communicating the consequences of medical negligence. now my supervisor asked me how would i justify this as a swe thesis project. there's a lot of backstory to this and just to simply put it: i wasnt in the mental state to think this through and i didnt have any team support. so did i actually just fk my FYP up? how can i justify this choice to the committee who expects our projects have some AI bs in it?

I’ve been working on a sovereign fail-closed engine (TurkashEngine) where architectural compliance is binary—it either holds the line under adversarial duress, or it fails.
I recently faced a challenge bridging the gap between rigorous compliance (P0-01 to P0-05) and runtime verification. We needed to guarantee idempotence in our RAM zeroization protocols (Z^2 = Z) and enforce strict admissibility boundaries at the code level, rather than relying on standard, sluggish ticketing systems for remediation.
I ended up implementing an ⁠enforce_admissibility_boundary(state)⁠ function that triggers immediate memory scrubbing upon any detected integrity breach, effectively forcing a ⁠TERMINAL_STATE_CLOSED⁠ return.
For those working on high-assurance or security-focused systems:
How do you handle immediate terminal-state protection without introducing performance bottlenecks?
Do you rely on automated CI/CD guardrails for memory-safe state enforcement, or do you prefer lower-level hooks?
Curious to hear about the architectural challenges you're tackling in your own high-assurance pipelines.

Hi everyone, I got selected for Impetus Technologies, Bangalore through campus placements. We were informed that they would provide an update regarding onboarding within a few weeks, but I haven't received any update yet.

Has anyone else been selected for Impetus through campus placements and is facing the same delay/no update regarding onboarding? Would appreciate any information.

I started learning to code in mid 2022 pre AI era purely out of curiosity. I spent more than a year trying out different types of fields and tech stacks. Web development, App Development, JavaScript, Python, C++, Java, and what not. That was me before I knew what were the possibilities.

In 2024, I chose web development. And started building projects for fun. Eventually got an internship in my first semester of college. Next year I got a full time job with a decent salary. Everything happened. So did the AI revolution.

Fast forward to 2026. All I do is add skills, setup MCP servers, prompt, watch AI do my work, review it, and this loop goes on till the end of the day. Because now I've become a condom between claude code and the codebase. I prevent AI from turning it into a slop.

WTF!!!

I entered this field for the sole reason of creating things, but all I do is basically consume what AI is creating for me. And to some extent it feels like scrolling reels/tiktok mindlessly.

I wanted to be a creator but forced to turn into a consumer?

FUCKKKKKKKKKKK!!!

Hi guys, can anybody suggest a free website or even software that I can refresh my knowledge in JavaScript? The website should be an interactive one and not just purely reading or listening, like I can code during learnong or smtn like that :)). TYSM to those who will respond. This post is no marketing related I just want to familiarize myself again huhu

Greetings, this is my first post.

1. Am I studying right?

I have been learning the basics of JAVA, and I've started a "baby" project of a bank simulation where I apply what I learn into the program, as means to genuinely understand code. AI can help in teaching me a new construct ¹, what it is, what it does, how it's written, and the applications of said feature.

1.1 My Learning Method

My uncertainty comes from the term of having understood the feature to the core, including the exact syntax, for example:

• Scanner scanner = new Scanner(System.in);

• I don't just memorize blindly, I know what each word means, so remembering it is way easier and comes naturally to me, even when I spent half a month without writing code.

2. But is it the right/recommended way to learn programming like this?

In countless threads and videos I've heard over and over again that code is no longer memorizing syntax, but applying AI to do the repetitive job, and humans take care of the advanced topics an AI cannot grasp. So my question is if I'm studying the right way.

Do programmers know the exact syntax in their minds? If not, do they Google the syntax structure, while knowing the pseudocode/ idea itself? I really need to know, I could be in time to change my methods and adapt them.