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.

It's fine that LLMs intercept most (if not all) of the common programming questions; this aligns with the higher level goals of Stack Overflow:

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?