Reflections on Legacy, Community, and the Future of AI: A Personal Note
A Personal Reflection on Legacy and Community
Life often moves in cycles, and sometimes those cycles bring moments of profound clarity. Recently, I experienced one such moment that intertwined personal loss with a deep appreciation for the communities that shape our world. This isn't a lengthy piece—just two key thoughts that have been on my mind.
The GMI Study and a Final Visit
Earlier this year, our team reordered the counties participating in the Guaranteed Minimum Income (GMI) rural study. We made a deliberate choice to place Mercer County, West Virginia—the county where my father lived—first in line for October 2025. I had a strong intuition that time was short, and that decision proved prescient. That October trip was the last time I saw him.
You can learn more about why we undertook this initiative on the RGMII Pledge page. The Rural Guaranteed Minimum Income Initiative (RGMII) aims to expand opportunity and strengthen democracy through a $50 million fund supporting rural GMI studies.
I knew this moment was coming, and so did he. There is no sense of loss because nothing truly ends. Every experience we shared—especially that last October visit—remains with me forever. Nothing was lost; everything was gained. We won capitalism, then returned to help improve it for everyone. And I am far from finished with my third startup.
The Indispensable Role of Stack Overflow in AI Development
Now, for the second thought: I want to express my heartfelt gratitude to every single person who has ever contributed to Stack Overflow—and I mean everyone.
Did you know that large language models (LLMs) essentially cannot code without access to the exceptionally high-quality, Creative Commons-licensed programming Q&A dataset that we all built together on Stack Overflow? Don't take my word for it—ask the LLMs themselves. Go ahead, really grill them on this topic. I strongly recommend using pro mode when querying, because those are the only decent LLM modes in my experience. It is incredible what you can achieve with a global brain statistics approach and a strongly curated dataset created by we, the people.
A Cautionary Tale for AI Companies
One last point: if the LLMs end up hollowing out the very communities that produce all their training data, they will deeply regret it. I offer the same advice to these LLM and generative AI companies that I gave to 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. That goose is the human community around your product that does all the real work.
Respect the Community That Built You
It is straightforward: treat the community with the respect they deserve—that we all deserve. Thank you for being a friend, because there is no way I could have done any of this without you. 💛
Note: This article contains personal reflections from Jeff Atwood, co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse, and current advocate for guaranteed minimum income initiatives.
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