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Urgent Warning to AI Companies
Jeff Atwood, co-founder of Stack Overflow, issued a stark warning to large language model (LLM) and generative AI companies: Do not destroy the human communities that provide the training data you rely on. In a personal blog post, Atwood drew a direct line between the success of modern AI coding tools and the community-built Stack Overflow dataset.
"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," Atwood wrote. He urged readers to verify this by asking the LLMs themselves.
Background: The Critical Role of Stack Overflow Data
Stack Overflow's extensive archive of programming questions and answers, licensed under Creative Commons, has become a foundational training source for AI models like OpenAI's GPT and Google's Gemini. Atwood emphasized that this dataset is "strongly curated" by human contributors—a global brain of expertise.
The co-founder advised AI companies to treat the community with respect. He recalled giving similar advice to Joel Spolsky when leaving Stack Overflow to start Discourse: "Do not, for any reason, under any circumstances, kill the goose that lays the golden eggs."
Personal Reflection: A Final Visit with His Father
Atwood also shared that October 2025 was the last time he saw his father before his passing. He revealed that the Guaranteed Minimum Income (GMI) rural study counties were reorganized so that Mercer County, West Virginia—his father's county—went first, allowing him to be present.
"There is no loss, because nothing ever ends," Atwood wrote. He described the experiences with his father as permanently gained.
What This Means: The Future of AI and Community
Atwood's warning comes as AI companies increasingly rely on user-generated content. If they "hollow out" the very communities that produce training data, they may face long-term consequences. He sees this as a critical moment for the tech industry.
Atwood concluded with a thank-you to everyone who contributed to Stack Overflow, emphasizing the collaborative effort behind the platform's success. His message: treat the community with the respect it deserves.