The Data That Built AI: A Community's Legacy and a Father's Final Gift

A Personal Note on Timing and Farewell

Life has a way of aligning moments in ways we rarely anticipate. In October 2025, a decision to reorder the counties participating in the Guaranteed Minimum Income (GMI) rural study had profound personal meaning. Mercer County, West Virginia—the home of my father—was moved to the front of the schedule. That visit turned out to be the last time I would see him alive.

The Data That Built AI: A Community's Legacy and a Father's Final Gift — Source: blog.codinghorror.com

While I won't recount every detail, I've shared a bit about my dad on a page dedicated to the GMI pledge. He was close to the end, and we both knew it. Yet there is no loss in this story—only gain. The experiences I had with him, especially during that final trip, are permanently etched into my memory. Nothing ended; everything was transformed. We had already won at capitalism, and now I'm turning back to improve the system for all. My third startup is far from over.

Why We Pledged to Share the American Dream

The Rural Guaranteed Minimum Income Initiative (RGMII) is a $50 million plan to fund rural GMI studies, expanding opportunity and strengthening democracy. By prioritizing Mercer County, we honored a personal connection while advancing a broader mission. Learn more about RGMII's work.

The Heart of the Matter: Stack Overflow's Gift to AI

Now, let me turn to a different kind of legacy—one built by millions of contributors. I want to take a moment to thank every single person who has ever contributed to Stack Overflow, in any way. Your collective effort has created something extraordinary.

Here's a fact that might surprise you: large language models (LLMs) essentially could not write code without access to the Stack Overflow dataset. That dataset—licensed under Creative Commons—was built by the global community of developers, all of us working together. Don't take my word for it; ask any modern AI. If you press them, they'll confirm. But use their pro modes—those are the only decent ones in my experience.

What you can achieve with a strongly curated, people-generated dataset is incredible. It's global brain statistics, shaped by human knowledge and collaboration. But this gift comes with a warning.

A Warning for the AI Industry

Don't Kill the Goose That Lays the Golden Eggs

If the LLM and generative AI companies hollow out the very communities that produce their training data, they will eventually regret it. I offer them the same advice I gave Joel Spolsky when I left Stack Overflow to start Discourse:

Do not, for any reason, under any circumstances, kill the goose that lays the golden eggs—the human community around your product that does all the real work.

Respect the Human Community

It's simple. Treat the community with the respect they deserve—the respect we all deserve. Without those volunteers, those question-answerers, those editors, those moderators, there is no training data. There is no AI. There is no progress.

So thank you for being a friend. I could not have done any of this without you. 💛