About a year ago, I was offered a presentation slot at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress in Berlin. I rarely take speaking engagements, especially international ones, but this one arrived at just the right time, the right place, and with the right person – I said yes, on the contingency that Ben Dumke-von der Ehe joins me in the presentation. Ben is an early community hire at Stack Overflow who lives in Berlin. We both had something important we wanted to talk about, with slightly different opinions, different perspectives.
They agreed to the requirement. This is our presentation, as delivered Friday, July 10th at the CityCube in Berlin.
The heart of this presentation is the human story of how Ben and I met. As I said on stage:
The long version of this story is that we changed each others' lives. The short version is: unicorns.
You should hear Ben's side of the story directly from him. It's remarkable. Also remarkable is that he left Stack Overflow, then came back... and then left again. I told Ben, I'm mostly doing this presentation because I owe you so much.
it is difficult to get a German to smile so you have to sneak attack
Not only Ben, but everyone who participated on Stack Overflow. We did it together, under a bedrock Creative Commons license that respected the effort everyone put into their work to build this commons, this hugely influential Stack Overflow dataset.
Passively searching and reading highly ranked Stack Overflow answers as they appear in web search results is arguably the primary goal of Stack Overflow. If Stack Overflow is working like it’s supposed to, 98% of programmers should get all the answers they need from reading search result pages and wouldn’t need to ask or answer a single question in their entire careers. This is a good thing! Great, even!
LLMs also cut the gordian knot of constant duplicate questions that I thought was basically impossible.
When you’re asking a question on a site that doesn’t allow duplicate questions, the problem space of a site with 1 million existing questions is rather different from a site with 10 million existing questions... or 100 million. Asking a single unique question goes from mildly difficult to mission almost impossible, because your question needs to thread a narrow path through this vast, enormous field of prior art questions without stepping on any of the vaguely similar looking landmines in the process.
The way LLMs can map a duplicate question using entirely different words to an existing answer is incredibly transformative, and a huge net positive. Less duplication. More answers, faster. That's the point.
But what happens to the commons when everyone is privately whispering to LLMs? What happens to the communities where programmers learn from each other, the very communities like Stack Overflow where Ben had so much fun becoming a programmer, and got hired for doing things he loved?
You can't "vibe code" love.
Where exactly will the LLMs get their next set of training data from, if we don't build for and protect the commons together? How will we continue to share knowledge – and love – with each other?
About 3 weeks ago, Leo Laporte and I recorded the first episode of what will be a new monthly show on the TWiT network. Naming things is hard, and we almost voted on the name, like we did for Stack Overflow, but we quickly landed on Off By One with Jeff Atwood – which is funny for so many reasons, but mainly because of this programmer joke:
No, I did not come up with this variation on the classic quote, but I wish I had. Well, whatever, here's show number two – free to view for everyone.
The show is 1h 47m of pure joy end to end. No negativity, just low-level insanity and of course, mandatory fun. We record the next episode in 4 days – and there's a live stream for Club TWiT Members.
(Let's do this. If, and only if, you watched the whole episode and liked what you saw ... for the first 10 people that fill out this form, I'll cover your Club TWiT membership for one full year so you can see if you enjoy the rest of the programming.)
Jeff Atwood, co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse, creator of the Coding Horror blog, joins Leo Laporte monthly for a conversation that follows its own logic. Prop comedy, computing history, the open web, wealth inequality, yo-yos. Off by one topic at all times, in the best possible way.
This is another way for Leo and I to share our enthusiasm for positive stuff in tech, and sharing is crucial because...
I realized, that’s it. That’s it exactly. That is what is so intensely satisfying about writing here. My happiness only becomes real when I share it with all of you.
Now, thanks to Wesley Faulkner, who introduced me to Leo and recommended I appear on a show, every month we can make our happiness real in a completely different dimension than writing alone – via the expressions on our faces, the tone of our voices, our body language. In other words, you can see and hear how we feel.
Here are 3 key quotes from the second Off By One episode, with linked timestamps, so you can jump directly to that section.
Jeff: I am not an elite coder by any stretch of the imagination... I am very persistent.
Leo: Isn't that funny? Because people... I mean, I think of you as one of the voices, one of the chief voices, in coding
Jeff: Well, I advocate for code that doesn't kill you in so many different ways. You know, survivable code. Ideally, no code at all.
Leo: Right.
Jeff: That's the best code, is none.
Leo: Right.
Jeff: It's a bit of a zen statement but it's true. So, I'm an advocate for, you know, good engineering. Good process. A process that recognizes that we're human and we should do this together, and we should actually kinda like each other, even.
Jeff: Dad's funny. He had kind of a dark sense of humor that I enjoyed. Betsy doesn't like it so much, and not too much, and I get it, but I enjoy it. And I called it "the last season of the John Atwood show". It's gonna be a real banger! And it was, it f***** was, it really was! Because we won capitalism, and then we went back and made it better for everyone. I don't think it gets better than that for me.
Jeff: And the other thing is, you can just run the math on this, I've posted several times on Mastodon and other places like LinkedIn, I've done some research and if we simply collected a fair tax from Billionaires, we could literally elimate all poverty in this country at the 100% FPL level, which is $15,000 per year. All poverty. We would have zero poverty. We have the means to do it.
Leo: That's really important.
Jeff: We lack the will.
If you want to witness the chaotic good of my original guest appearance which led to this show, watch the first 45 minutes of Intelligent Machines #859, recorded on Feb 25th along with Paris Martineau, Jeff Jarvis, and Leo. I dialed down the chaos considerably for the Off By One show, but for this one, I personally think it's funnier to watch Paris' reaction to me for the entire show. You've been warned!
Here are 3 key quotes from this episode, with linked timestamps, so you can jump directly to that section.
Leo: Well in a way it's a shame because we have in the last year kind of stepped back from our global initiatives in the united states and I think we do have a responsibility. I think your partner is absolutely right. If you have everything you need, then help others have everything they need.
Jeff: What is money even FOR? I don't even have "that much", what do you.. how do you spend it all? I don't have.. I just want a simple life, man!
Jeff: I mean.. have you seen some of the stuff LLMs will do when you tell them to optimize? It's like, optimize this for 95% and it's like okay, "return true".
Leo: That's a good optimization!
Jeff: Well, because it doesn't know what it's doing. It has no actual understanding. It's playing a game of global brain statistics and copy paste. And it's good at like, merging... I call it JPEG for words, which it kind of is. And there's so much stuff. It's like reading summaries. And it is very accurate with summaries. We saw this on discourse. They implemented it. I was very skeptical. And I went to some very complex discussions. We had on our internal discourse and read the summary and was like that is a very good summary and it captured the key points in the discussion. It could have captured more, but it got nothing wrong. And it basically was JPEG for that conversation, wasn't it.. without much loss.
Jeff: Now does JPEG work on EVERY image? No. Garfield is a bad choice, for, yknow, JPEG.
Jeff Atwood – Ok, the first guilded age, we're deep in the second one now. I mean, just look up the numbers. More money in the hands of fewer people than in any other period of time. In the first guilded age, that was basically the railroad barons. Guess who it is in the second guilded age? I'm in this picture and I don't like it. So like, what are we gonna do about it?
So thank you, Leo and Wesley, for giving me another way to make happiness real by sharing it with all of you, now in video and audio form, all the feels, all the time. Well, once per month.
Let us know what you think – I don't mind comments here but I'm much more likely to answer on the TWiT community Discourse. Try on a paragraph for size, our old pal the pilcrow ¶. You might even like it! It's possible the practice of writing paragraphs and forming coherent narratives might even improve your overall writing and communication skills. Or your life, even.
I also heard a rumor that any Club TWiT users who make their way from the Discord and post regularly on the TWiT Discourse might get a super cool little token of appreciation in the postal mail from some user named "Junk". Who knows? Who can say what might happen? 🤔
It's been one of those months, and by that, I mean one of the 663 months since I was born. This won't be a long post, because I only have two things to say. First, I'm really glad we re-ordered the GMI (Guaranteed Minimum Income) rural study counties so Mercer County, WV, my Dad's county, went first in October 2025. I knew dad was close to the end, and sure enough, that was the last time I ever saw him.
You can kinda sorta meet my dad on this page, if you want to.
I knew this was coming, and so did he. There is no loss, because nothing ever ends.
All those experiences I had with my father, particularly that last October trip, will stay with me forever. Nothing was lost. Everything was gained. We won capitalism, then went back to help improve it for everyone. And believe me, I'm far from being done with my third startup.
Second, I want to take a moment to thank everyone – and I do mean everyone – who ever contributed to Stack Overflow in any way. And lucky you, it's not Starship this time!
Did you know that LLMs basically could not code at all without access to the extremely high quality creative commons programming Q&A dataset that all of us built together at Stack Overflow? Don't take it from me, ask the LLMs. They'll tell you themselves. Go ahead. G'wan. Ask. Really grill 'em on this one. I strongly recommend you use pro mode when asking, though, because those are the only decent LLM modes in my experience. It is incredible what you can do with global brain statistics and a strongly curated dataset created by we, the people!
One last thing. If the LLMs end up hollowing out the very communities that produce all their training data, they're going to really, really regret that. I'll give these LLM / GAI companies the same advice I gave Joel Spolsky when I left Stack Overflow to start Discourse – do not, for any reason, under any circumstances, kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, aka the human community around your product that does all the real work. It's pretty simple. Just treat the community with the respect they deserve... that we all deserve.
