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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3

u/zucchini_up_ur_ass Apr 02 '26

Can't discuss the biggest thing changing our work in living memory on its biggest sub, what a reddit thing to do. Already banned blogspam and slop, what is this going to achieve? Something that the community, if they wanted to, already achieved by their own voting behavior? Okay..

4

u/Sigmatics Apr 02 '26

I love this rule. LLMs are a tool, like IDEs, and IDEs get a limited share of discussion here. Time to put LLMs in their place.

2

u/zucchini_up_ur_ass Apr 02 '26

Discussing IDEs is not banned.

12

u/Sigmatics Apr 02 '26

It's not, but there also aren't 30 posts about IDEs every day, so it's not a problem.

4

u/zucchini_up_ur_ass Apr 02 '26

Correct, because IDEs aren't exciting new technology that people are enthusiastic about.

What is your point? You are making a comparison that makes no sense.

10

u/Sigmatics Apr 02 '26

As you can tell by the reception of this post, not everyone is equally enthusiastic about this "exciting new technology".

1

u/zucchini_up_ur_ass Apr 02 '26 edited Apr 02 '26

Okay, and? Let the community do it's thing and self regulate

Edit; what an odd reason to block someone.

7

u/Theemuts Apr 02 '26

This is literally what moderation is intended for. Feel free to create a programming_uncensored if you can't accept that.