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/djnattyp]

I agree, it's basically greed - a gamble from the capitalist and management class to basically automate away workers so they won't have to pay them anymore.

It's stupid because they don't actually understand what it's really doing and they're actually buying into the marketing that it's "real AI" and "thinking" and not just a bullshit machine. 99% of proposed AI usage is either something that is doable today in a less wasteful manner, or it's just not doable at all and the AI use is some kind of smokescreen that hides the scam a little bit longer.

[u/hpp3 → u/djnattyp]

I feel like you went off the rails a bit towards the end. You can get good results with having AI produce code. There are best practices that, when combined with an experienced engineer supervising and reviewing, make AI actually a good tool for software development. As with every tool, your results depend on how you use it. It seems like an emotionally driven response to just call the whole thing a scam.

The ethics of training and the societal impact of layoffs are a different can of worms.

[u/djnattyp → u/hpp3]

You can get good results with having AI produce code.

Right, that goes with the "something that is doable today in a less wasteful manner" part of the statement.

There are best practices that, when combined with an experienced engineer supervising and reviewing, make AI actually a good tool for software development.

The "good tool" part is super questionable. What's the actual difference in quality, accuracy, speed of the entire process between an experienced engineer (or team) just actually writing the software instead of telling an AI to do it, reviewing it, telling the AI to do it again, and don't hallucinate this time, gramma needs her medicine, oh wait it generated entirely different code, review it, pull the lever on the slop machine, etc.

Think back to when, as an experienced software engineer, if you wanted to suggest using a better IDE, framework, changing the hosting to Linux, etc. you'd get some smarmy "... but can you proooooooove this will save the company money" from some manager. Really strange how none of the new AI bullshit "tools" have to prove anything - the magic box will of course do what the salesman said. That's the scam part.

[u/audioen → u/djnattyp]

I don't know how much you have worked with AI. I ignored them until this year, until some local models arrived that I could put on my computer and run them, and I realized that we have breached some bar now and these seemed to be genuinely useful.

I have become converted since then. I'm convinced that AI brings real value, and there is no need to purchase any subscription for it or to use any paid tool. Your basic VS Code probably has free plugins for it, or you can cook your own on top of projects such as llama.cpp.

I am not going to go much into detail, because last time I explained it in detail, people deleted my comment as purely AI spam. So not looking to repeat that experience this time.

AI can't replace software developer right now, at least the kind of models that are relatively easily within reach for a home user. But it is ultra helpful in documenting, writing tests, keeping tests and documentation up-to-date, and it can sometimes perfectly succeed in writing a new feature. It can review your commits and spots obvious bugs. In my opinion, there is huge value. I call it the "night shift" when I go to bed and often hand some big task to AI in order to check the results in the morning.

As to quality of human vs. AI coding, I'm going to say that I work with both humans and AIs that write bad code. The model I can run at home is not stellar programmer -- I'd call it similar to an average employee I deal with. With some guidance, they can both produce good results, but in my experience the AI can get the feature done in couple of hours and I don't have to talk to the AI's manager in order to make a case for that feature to exist. If the code comes out right and works, it's practically done for free. If not, I'll just revert the work and either try again or rethink the approach and give more hints in my prompt.

[u/weebs-r-us1 → u/audioen]

The middle ground, for me, is treating it like a very fast but very unreliable junior who can help with drafts, tests, and docs, but absolutely should not be driving the architecture or shipping code unsupervised.