The number of questions on Stack Overflow fell by 78 percent in December 2025 compared to a year earlier. Developers are switching en masse to AI tools in
If we go by personal experience, we recently had the time of several people wasted troubleshooting an issue for a very well known commercial Java app server. The AI overview hallucinated a fake system property for addressing an issue we had.
The person that proposed the change neglected to mention they got it from AI until someone noticed the setting did not appear anywhere in the official system properties documented by the vendor. Now their personal reputation is that they should not be trusted and they seem lazy on top of it because they could not use their eyes to read a one page document.
That’s a very interesting insight. Maybe the amount of hallucination depends on whether the “knowledge” was loaded in form of a prompt vs training data? In the experience I’m talking about there’s no hallucination at all, but there are wrong conclusions and hypotheses sometimes, especially with really tricky bugs. But that’s normal, the really tricky edge cases is probably not something I’d expect to find on SO anyway…
If we go by personal experience, we recently had the time of several people wasted troubleshooting an issue for a very well known commercial Java app server. The AI overview hallucinated a fake system property for addressing an issue we had.
The person that proposed the change neglected to mention they got it from AI until someone noticed the setting did not appear anywhere in the official system properties documented by the vendor. Now their personal reputation is that they should not be trusted and they seem lazy on top of it because they could not use their eyes to read a one page document.
That’s a very interesting insight. Maybe the amount of hallucination depends on whether the “knowledge” was loaded in form of a prompt vs training data? In the experience I’m talking about there’s no hallucination at all, but there are wrong conclusions and hypotheses sometimes, especially with really tricky bugs. But that’s normal, the really tricky edge cases is probably not something I’d expect to find on SO anyway…