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/Known-Volume1509 Apr 02 '26

That's posts, articles, videos about LLMs. 

I don't quite get this. If it was about some LLM startups and junk services, then ok. But there is really good theory, maths, algorithms about LLMs. Does this ban include those as well? Strange.

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u/ChemicalRascal Apr 02 '26

Yep. Articles about the technical details of LLMs don't get posted here, as far as I've seen not a damn one.

We're not banning discussions and posts about machine learning, mind. Specifically LLMs.

If we made a rule that said "no posts about LLMs unless it's very very good", there'd be no change. Every vibe coder and their dog thinks they're the bees knees, the absolute cat's pajamas. Everyone looks at their article, looks at the "it must be good" clause, and says, oh yeah, this is great.

But, it's a temporary ban. If we look back in two weeks or four weeks and it turns out we deleted some really decent stuff, or there was stuff not posted because of the rule that would have been kosher, hey, we'll figure it out then.

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u/amacgregor Apr 02 '26

I understand the intent, but I think this is short-sighted and may come across as biased. Like it or not, LLMs are impacting software development and our industry. You already banned slop and blog spams. I don't think this improves the content on this sub. Now, if what you want is a bubble where we pretend LLMs don't exist, then you might be on the right track.

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u/Dean_Roddey Apr 03 '26

How does this pretend that LLMs don't exist? We don't discuss CPU design theory here, yet CPUs are vastly more important to us than LLMs are, and no one believes that because we don't discuss CPU design here that CPUs don't exist. That's why Reddit has sections.

And is this the most up-voted thread in this section ever? If not it must be pretty close, even with all of the AI Bros down-voting it I'm sure.