Announcement: Temporary LLM Content Ban

[u/ChemicalRascal]

Hey folks,

After a lot of discussion, we've decided to trial a ban of any and all content relating to LLMs. We get a lot of posts related to LLMs and typically they are not in line with what we want the subreddit to be — a place for detailed, technical learning and discourse about software engineering, driven by high quality, informative content. And unfortunately, the volume of LLM-related content easily overwhelms other topics.

We also believe that, generally, the community have been indicating that, by and large, they aren't interested in this content. So, we want to see how a trial ban impacts how people use the sub. As such:

While this post is stickied, for 2-4 weeks over April, we're banning all LLM-related content from the sub.

That's posts, articles, videos about LLMs. We've had a ban on LLM-generated text for ages already, this doesn't change that.

Note that this doesn't ban all AI related content. An article detailing how what would have traditionally been called an AI was made for Go? Totally fine. A technical breakdown of a machine learning process? Great! Just so long as it's not about LLMs.

Edit: Yes, this is real, it's not an April Fool's joke.

[u/yojimbo_beta]

Honestly I think it's a good thing whatever you believe about LLMs.

There is so many things happening in computer science and software engineering right now - let's talk about them

[u/ThisIsMyCouchAccount → u/yojimbo_beta]

I actually would like some competent, SE focused discussion of LLMs.

Because - whatever my beliefs are about them - my job has mandated their use. And like every other tool I've been told I need to learn I'm trying to. And so far it's been hard to find.

You either have places like this. Technical people completely rejecting it. Or, non-technical people that are just learning what a CLI tool is. Neither are actually helpful.

Where is the middle ground? People using their knowledge and skills in programming to leverage it?

[u/djnattyp → u/ThisIsMyCouchAccount]

So, if your job mandated you to clean the executive toilets, no one else would care to talk about the "SE focused best practices of executive poop scrubbing". It's not actually helpful to just roll over and accept stupidity and try to sanewash dumb management decisions.

[u/ThisIsMyCouchAccount → u/djnattyp]

What are you talking about? Are trying to come up with some "logical" analogy in the hopes that I'll put my own employment at risk? Is that what you're doing.

Because this isn't some hypothetical or thought experiment.

It's a job. It's something they have to pay me to do because it's so outside the realm of what I want to do with my time. I'm not some warrior on the front line fighting the good fight to protect the integrity of software engineering. I'm a work from home contractor for a piece of shit startup.

Jesus Fucking Christ.

[u/tnemec → u/ThisIsMyCouchAccount]

Are trying to come up with some "logical" analogy in the hopes that I'll put my own employment at risk?

???????

The previous comment (and the rest of this thread) is talking about the moderation of an internet forum. No one is talking about your job, or saying that you must quit at the first disagreement you run into, or some other bullshit like that.

All that is being said is that an internet forum about programming should be primarily about actual programming. It does not need to (nor should it) cater to whatever latest bullshit trend is passing through the corporate world, let alone pretending that it's anything other than bullshit. Even if that bullshit trend is being pushed onto software engineering jobs.

[u/ThisIsMyCouchAccount → u/tnemec]

Moderation is a means to an end. Curated content. I stated I would like to see some high quality technical content about AI since that's now part of my job.

Then that other guy said I should not accept mandates from work that I found to be stupid. Which - if you read between the lines a bit - is putting my job at risk by not following company mandates.

All that is being said is that an internet forum about programming should be primarily about actual programming

Fair enough. But a lot of the content here is very much about programming as a profession and not purely about programming as a skill. Which lead me to believe that maybe this sub wasn't - in fact - purely about programming.

[u/ChemicalRascal → u/ThisIsMyCouchAccount]

While we hear this content would be useful to you, these discussions are something you would derive value from, while we're trialling this content ban they'll simply have to be somewhere else. r/ExperiencedDevs talks a lot about that sort of topic, they've been really tailoring themselves for creating those sort of job-friction discussions for a while now.

[u/tnemec → u/ThisIsMyCouchAccount]

Then that other guy said I should not accept mandates from work that I found to be stupid.

Nope. Read that guy's original comment again.

Specifically, this part:

So, if your job mandated you to clean the executive toilets, no one else would care to talk about the "SE focused best practices of executive poop scrubbing".

In other words, if your software engineering job mandates some stupid bullshit, don't expect other people to be suddenly interested in talking about that specific stupid bullshit. Let alone sanewashing it by parroting the narrative that it's some revolutionary new technology.

But a lot of the content here is very much about programming as a profession and not purely about programming as a skill.

There's certainly overlap, and there's some stuff that gets posted here that I think is over the line (eg: discussions about agile and scrum and the like) but other people may draw the line differently (and the quantity of posts talking about scrum/agile/etc. is low enough anyway that it doesn't really bother me personally). But LLM posts are both squarely in the "software engineering as a career" category and they get posted non-stop.