If we do not stop to help each other, what do we become?
Yesterday, I received this email as a response to You Can't Vibe Code Love. It's such a remarkable and powerful statement that I asked permission to share it here, in its entirety, with personal information redacted:
Hey Jeff,
Hope you and your family are doing well.
Just jogging your memory; I reached out to you (and John Carmack) about how difficult interviewing had become despite me being a stellar engineer at my work. You offered some words of wisdom, wrote me a postcard, which I still have, and stickers (which my kids loved).
I took a leadership coordination role in Tokyo, and it freed me from the interview process I hated, and I'm still programming. Through the public school here my family found our way into a community, which brings me to why I'm writing.
I've been thinking about Stack Overflow drying up and honestly; I feel profoundly sad.
2013 I was active duty in the Air Force. Simultaneously I was also going to college full time remotely. I was deployed in Zamboanga Philippines. The Zamboanga Siege happens. Over 100 people killed, 120,000 civilians displaced. It was warfare in a populated city where nobody should have every been caught up in that to begin with. For 3 weeks this went on.
I was still doing college. I still had homework, tests, projects. All of that needed to be done.
With everything happening around me, missing my projects and homework became a huge risk. Everyday was a fight to do my job and help these people, and do my school. I would cry a lot looking at my textbooks not sleeping. The smoke from the burning city would come in the cracks of the buildings I worked and lived in.
I had a Microsoft Surface because it was perfect for someone who was flying around with equipment on vehicles that vibrated all the time. I swapped the plate out from my vest and slid in my Surface so that I could still do my homework if we had to leave. That's how important this was to me.
Sometimes I would get stuck, and I needed someone to just nudge me in the right direction.
I actually come from a family with a few software engineers. I have friends who were software engineers. I reached out for help. The standard response from everyone fell between ignoring me or telling me I need to "do it myself".
You know who did help me? Random strangers on Stack Overflow. People who had nothing to gain from helping me other than just trying to help someone in need.
That meant so much to me. I felt a connection to people through a community.
And it meant the world.
An LLM would have done exactly what I wanted back then. But would it have given me what I needed?
At the time, I needed to know somebody cared enough to help me.
You, your colleagues, and random strangers in the Stack Overflow Community, really helped me. It was more than answering my questions. You gave me your time. That made me feel like I mattered. The fact my questions could help other people in my predicament made me feel like I was part of something.
An LLM can't do that.
So when I watch communities hollow out, replaced by something that gives answers but doesn't give me a single thought... I get depressed. Because we're losing something that was always there but I didn't notice. It's like losing gravity.
Thanks for everything.
If you ever find yourself in [city] I'd love to say thank you personally.
Hope all is well,
D
Perhaps the LLMs are a reminder that we should make an extra effort to cultivate relationships with each other and form communities online – communities that belong to us, not some billionaire. Communities where we regularly stop to help each other, because that's how we learn too. And if we do not stop to help each other... what do we become?
