It obviously sucks that the engagement is gone. But from the user perspective, agents are great. Asking questions about software on public forums is an awful experience, you’re lucky to not get mocked (especially on stack overflow), or get remarks like ‘why did you not read the docs?’. On top of getting an answer instantly. Why I stuck around here is because the Julia community really is the exception. People here are just great.
But from the user perspective, agents are great.
I agree and I’m certainly also asking people fewer questions now if I can get to the solution myself with the help of an agent. To some degree I find that polite because I don’t want to encroach on maintainers’ time if I don’t have to. If this results in a less vibrant community that’s partially a reflection of social ties in our space being a side effect of functional relationships (I communicate as a means to an end result). So with AI agents absorbing some of that function, if we want to keep our social ties here we need to have more communication for its own sake, like mentioned above:
Maybe there’s a need for more casual/personal topics to keep people interested, e.g. recurring topics like “what are you working on this month ?”
Just speaking for myself, but I will happily talk anybody’s ear off about the pet projects I’m working on — recurring casual events to talk about what you’re working on sounds fun, but there’s a sweet spot for size and a few other elements that I think are rather critical to whether it works well.
It does seem like it could be a fun idea though.
It is interesting that while the number of users and posts have dropped by about 2/3 the number of pageviews has nearly doubled.
There are a lot of scrapers, gotta find “new” data to feed the bots somehow 
How else would the chatbot know how e.g. Makie works?
Agreed. It is a bit sad to see fewer posts here. This forum is probably the place where I’ve spent the most time on the internet over the last decade.
But if there are fewer questions requiring answers, I think this just means that we need build different types of ways for the community to interact.
We had a JuMP-dev event recently, with 60 people on Day 1, and 90 people on Day 2: JuMP-dev 2026 | JuMP. It’s so nice to see the breaks with people sitting around chatting or a group gesticulating over a shared laptop.