Jeff Atwood

Jeff Atwood (born 1970) is one of the most influential programmer-writers of his generation. His blog Coding Horror, started in 2004, built an audience of millions of developers, and in 2008 he co-founded Stack Overflow with Joel Spolsky — the Q&A site that became the collective memory of the programming profession. In 2013 he launched Discourse, open-source forum software built on the same conviction that healthy online communities are engineering problems worth solving.

The goose and the golden eggs

That résumé gives Atwood unusual standing in the AI debate: the Creative Commons–licensed corpus of Stack Overflow questions and answers is widely regarded as one of the datasets that taught large language models to program. As AI assistants siphoned off the site’s traffic — a collapse chronicled across the tech press in 2025 — Atwood went public with a warning to the companies profiting from his community’s work.

Atwood’s critique is narrower than blanket AI rejection — he does not dispute that the tools work, only that they are strip-mining the commons that made them possible. His prescription is respect and reciprocity: treat the contributing community “with the respect they deserve,” or watch the well of fresh, high-quality training data run dry. It is the same argument raised by publishers like The New York Times, transposed into open-source culture, where the licensing was generous and the exploitation stings differently.