Jeff Atwood: if we do not stop to help each other, what do we become?

Jeff Atwood, co-founder of Stack Overflow, has published on his Coding Horror blog a letter from a reader that arrived in response to his earlier post "You Can't Vibe Code Love". The letter describes what a programming community gave its author at the hardest moment of his life, and why he believes an AI model could not have replaced it.

A letter from Zamboanga, 2013

The reader signs the note simply as D. In 2013 he was on active duty in the U.S. Air Force and studying for a degree full-time by remote courses. He was deployed in Zamboanga, in the Philippines, when fighting broke out in the city: more than 100 people were killed and 120,000 civilians were displaced. The clashes went on for three weeks.

He still had homework, tests and projects to finish, and missing them was a serious risk. He remembers not sleeping and crying over his textbooks, while smoke from the burning city came in through the cracks of the buildings where he worked and lived. He carried a Microsoft Surface so he could keep studying if his unit had to move, swapping the armour plate out of his vest to slide the device in.

When he got stuck, he needed someone to nudge him in the right direction. He had software engineers in his family and among his friends, but the responses to his requests for help ranged from silence to being told to work it out himself. The people who did help were strangers on Stack Overflow, who had nothing to gain from it. The letter also catches Atwood up on his life: he later moved into a leadership coordination role in Tokyo, is still programming, and his family found a community through the local public school.

What an AI model cannot give

"An AI model would have done exactly what I wanted back then," the reader writes. "But would it have given me what I needed?" What he needed, he says, was to know that somebody cared enough to help him. The replies on Stack Overflow were more than technical answers: the strangers gave him their time, and that made him feel he mattered, while the fact that his questions could help others in the same situation made him feel part of something. "AI can't do that."

Watching communities hollow out depresses him, he adds. Something that supplies answers but not a single thought is replacing a place that was always there, and he describes the loss as being like losing gravity.

Communities that belong to us

Atwood closes with a short reflection. AI models, he suggests, are a reminder to make an extra effort to cultivate relationships with each other and to form communities online: communities that belong to us rather than to some billionaire, communities where people regularly stop to help each other, because that is how we learn too. The post ends on the question its title asks: if we do not stop to help each other, what do we become?