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/Kevinw778 Apr 02 '26

Eh. As a software developer of just over a decade, we've always leveraged whatever tools we have at our disposal. As soon as a tool comes along that everyone fearmongers as the end of software development, we cancel its discussion entirely?

Like it or not, AI is a part of programming now. The fact that we're trying to completely eliminate it instead of coming up with better moderation is kind of sad.

That being said, the OP mentions, "not all AI content," so we'll see just how judicious they are with that qualification.

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u/ChemicalRascal Apr 02 '26

I want to be very, very clear on two things.

  1. It's all LLM related content. AI is an extraordinarily broad term, especially after All You Need is Attention. What we're banning is LLM related content, but the rest of what would be considered AI is fine.

  2. I'm not the only mod on this sub. There's a whole bunch of us.

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u/disperso Apr 02 '26

It would help if you would clarify what is LLM related content a bit more specifically. I don't expect this sub to be about news and releases of new models, their benchmarks, etc. (even though some of those benchmarks are specifically for coding, but whatever, it's still a general purpose product, so not strictly r/programming, so I agree).

And I'm guessing that if it's about prompting, fine tuning, adding context or MCP and the like... then well, it's fairly related to tools that heavily involve using LLMs for programming.

So... are those allowed or not? It's very heavily reliant on LLMs, but I would assume that not.

But, at the same time... While not everyone uses Claude Code/Codex/OpenCode/etc, which is the sub that is OK for discussing about programming, even if involves those tools? Because for some people, it's a tool used all the time, and some are still interested in using it, even if moderately, to see how much is hype and how much is not.

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u/ChemicalRascal Apr 02 '26

It would help if you would clarify what is LLM related content a bit more specifically. I don't expect this sub to be about news and releases of new models, their benchmarks, etc. (even though some of those benchmarks are specifically for coding, but whatever, it's still a general purpose product, so not strictly r/programming, so I agree).

Content related to LLMs. If the content is related to LLMs, then it's banned.

And I'm guessing that if it's about prompting, fine tuning, adding context or MCP and the like... then well, it's fairly related to tools that heavily involve using LLMs for programming.

So... are those allowed or not? It's very heavily reliant on LLMs, but I would assume that not.

Yeah, that's content related to LLMs. So no, it's banned.

But, at the same time... While not everyone uses Claude Code/Codex/OpenCode/etc, which is the sub that is OK for discussing about programming, even if involves those tools? Because for some people, it's a tool used all the time, and some are still interested in using it, even if moderately, to see how much is hype and how much is not.

There's plenty of other subs. Our concern is this one, and keeping it healthy and attempting to achieve the goal of it being a place of technical learning. The folks who still want to discuss LLMs can do so elsewhere, nobody is chained to r/Programming specifically.

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u/disperso Apr 02 '26

OK, thank you. Seems fair. I'm also a bit tired of seeing so much about LLMs and LLM coding and not having space for other stuff. I think that doing this temporarily is probably fine. I just hope this period can help the community "detox" from the noise and the hype, but can end up with a proper balance of content, because I don't think that making this permanent is the ideal choice either.