None of Us Is As Dumb As All of Us: Community And Knowledge Go Hand In Hand

Ben and Jeff met in 2010, when Jeff hired Ben straight out of the nascent community forming on Stack Overflow – but to Jeff’s surprise, Ben was not actually a professional software developer (yet). He was a curious tinkerer, a hobby programmer who loved figuring out how things worked, building things, and learning from others. But what is left of the community that helped Ben become successful? How do the curious tinkerers of today form communities to learn what’s beneath the surface of the simple LLM answers? We must continue to build a public commons of programming knowledge that benefits everyone, especially in a time when LLM providers dream of monopolizing that knowledge.