Lets say you are tracking lion populations. You watch a couple of watering holes and count the number of lions. From there you use stats to make estimates of

Lets say you are tracking lion populations. You watch a couple of watering holes and count the number of lions. From there you use stats to make estimates of total number of lions in the world. Suddenly your data shows a drop of 30% and is continuing to decline. Are lions going extinct, or did they find a new watering hole? If they found a new watering hole then you need to change your measuring locations to account for the shift. I don't think software development has started slowing down. So the data is indicating that the way they were measuring is becoming less useful than it was, and that they will need to find new data sources if they are going to continue. If that really is AI, maybe Copilot and friends will become an interesting source of data on programming language use.