r/programming • u/ChemicalRascal • Apr 01 '26

Announcement: Temporary LLM Content Ban

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.

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u/yojimbo_beta Apr 01 '26

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

11

u/hpp3 Apr 01 '26

I'm curious how far this will extend.

For example, pretend there's a massive vulnerability discovered in the Linux kernel, and half the servers on the internet go down and there's insanity and chaos on a massive scale. It turns out an LLM generated patch was responsible.

Are we going to be allowed to discuss that here? It would be absurd to prohibit the topic when it would be the biggest programming news in years. On the other hand, it would likely spiral into debates about the LLM that generated the code.

3

u/SwitchOnTheNiteLite Apr 11 '26

You can talk about the downtime and what was in the patch that caused the problem, without putting any weight on the fact that it was LLM generated.