The "new users, who often struggle to find their footing" are going to turn to AI. They already have, hence the drop in traffic.

That's good! (For them.) A personal helpdesk that can walk you through your particular problem, debugging, homework question, etc. That's _way_ better than waiting for humans to try to answer your slapdash question.

So it's really unclear why the company is redesigning the classic Q/A site to be better for those kinds of questions, when AI already exists and is already really good at answering them better than the human volunteers here can.

Stack Overflow Q/A (classic) provides the library of high-quality, curated questions and canonical answers. This will continue to be valuable both for humans and as the training data for AI. Keep it as is. Provide a different path / different website for the helpdesk questions... and you should probably power that with AI.

(N.B. I have a hard time imagining why many people would turn to _Stack Overflow's AI agent_ for help, when ChatGPT or Claude or whatever are probably better for the task and have a brighter future. That sucks for the company; you probably won't have disruptive growth or earn back the $1.8 Billion purchase price. But this redesign isn't going to fight that tide either.)