If we do not stop to help each other, what do we become?
- ID
- 29135
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 27 Sep 2026, 11:20 AM
- Fetched
- 28 Sep 2026, 1:59 AM
- Provider
- Hacker News
- Category
- dev-community
- Original URL
- https://blog.codinghorror.com/if-we-do-not-stop-to-help-each-other-what-do-we-become/
- Source URL
- https://hnrss.org/best
Summary
- Score
- 4.5
- Created
- 28 Sep 2026, 1:59 AM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersvibe_coders
What happened
Jeff Atwood publishes an email from a reader who, while deployed in Zamboanga during the 2013 siege (over 100 killed, 120,000 civilians displaced, three weeks) and studying remotely, was ignored by his software-engineer family and friends but helped by strangers on Stack Overflow — the same site Atwood describes as 'drying up'. The reader, now in a leadership coordination role in Tokyo, says an LLM 'would have done exactly what I wanted back then' but that what he needed was to know somebody cared enough to help. The Hacker News thread drew 194 points and 76 comments.
Why it matters
If your team's answer to 'how do I learn this' is 'just ask an LLM', this is the counter-case: the reader got answers from an LLM-equivalent of his friends and it still wasn't what he needed — the help that kept him going came from strangers on a Q&A site that is now shrinking. Decide which questions your team routes to an assistant for speed and which ones you deliberately keep human, because the informal channel you may have been leaning on (public Stack Overflow) is not being refilled.
Discussion angle
Ask the room for the last question they sent to an LLM instead of a colleague, then ask what they'd have lost if the colleague had answered it instead — and whether anyone present has answered a stranger's technical question in the past month.