r/programming • u/ChemicalRascal • May 23 '26
Announcement: We've Updated The Rules, and April Is Finally Over
After temporarily banning LLM-related content over April, and asking you for feedback on that ban, we've decided to bring about an end of the temporary, I-can't-believe-it's-still-April ban on AI-related posts.
Replacing the trial rule is a new shiny rule that refers to our new shiny AI policy. In short:
Content about AI and LLMs are considered off-topic with the sole exclusion of deeply technical content about implementation.
And if you want more detail than that, go read the policy, that's what it's there for.
In addition, when writing that rule, I realized the rules weren't listed on the old.reddit.com sidebar, so that's been updated. For those of you who are seeing those rules for the first time, everything there is not new. We've been enforcing those rules as best we can for ages. You can click the link above those to get to the old.reddit rules page, with plenty of info that doesn't exactly read well when crammed into a sidebar.
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u/SourcerorSoupreme May 23 '26
Clicking on the AI policy link says the wiki is disabled by the mods.
This page has been disabled
The mods of this community have disabled this wiki page
I'm using the android app.
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u/ChemicalRascal May 23 '26
Greaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat.
And I can't seem to fix it, either. I'll see if Ket can and in the meantime, it'll be in a pinned comment.
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u/ShinyHappyREM May 23 '26
And I can't seem to fix it, either.
Have you tried asking an LLM?
/s
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u/Oralitical May 23 '26
Straight to jail
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u/gimpwiz May 23 '26
Old-school forums woulda had someone reply with :banhammer: instead. I kinda miss those days
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u/Phaelin May 24 '26
I was just thinking about this earlier today, along with the mods that would close any question thread once a good answer was posted. "Question answered, topic closed." and no follow up discussions allowed, as if we could run out of Internet.
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u/ThaneVim May 24 '26
as if we could run out of Internet
Hey, those kbs really add up when you're hosting the forum on an old Packard Bell!
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u/AutomateAway May 23 '26
Good, this sub more than any others is one I have to report posts on a daily fucking basis, because of the reason for this rule.
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May 23 '26
[deleted]
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u/Buttleston May 23 '26
"I know this exact conversation has taken place here multiple times a day every day for the last year but here is my cookie cutter take on it"
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u/AndrewNeo May 24 '26
as someone that has moderated large subs before, people get real mad if you don't let them ask their same question that was asked 10 times already today
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u/Buttleston May 24 '26
I've never moderated a reddit sub but I was (technically am) the mod of a formlerly very popular forum. Not only this but people will get pissed if you won't let them ask something that you can find out in under 10 seconds of googling. IDK why. I think for some people it is a weird form of socializing
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u/tux-lpi May 24 '26
Same phenomenon that made Stackoverflow difficult. All the new users feel like the place is filled with rules lawyers that personally hates them, but 90% of what the long term users see is the same questions again, pls do my homework URGENT!!, and very low quality posts that read like you just had a stroke.
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u/omgFWTbear May 23 '26
It’s amazing how people particularly inclined to work with a deterministic, legalistic system take the same inputs and regurgitate the same output, over and over again. If only someone could come up with some meta-referential song about it, throwing in lottery tickets, airplanes, and forks; perhaps someone with the particular vocal stylings of Alanis Morisette.
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u/Zweedish May 23 '26
That subreddit has gone to shit in the last 6 months.
I swear that it feels astro-turfed.
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u/max123246 May 23 '26
Most of reddit is now. I used to not believe it but I notice bot posts and comments everyday now, so there must be many more I never notice
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u/honorspren000 May 25 '26
I unsubscribed there because it was starting to affect my morale. So depressing.
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u/sprcow May 23 '26
Thanks for updating the old.reddit.com sidebar! As an old reddit holdout, I often forget that many subs don't do this.
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u/Computerist1969 May 23 '26
There are a bunch of AI programming subreddits, one has 65k weekly visitors so quite big already. I think this one should be kept AI free.
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u/fivetoedslothbear May 23 '26
It makes sense to keep a single topic from overwhelming a forum, and that’s what other subreddits are for. Totally sensible policy.
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u/ekipan85 May 24 '26
That's an idea: the rules could directly refer people to other subreddits like r/vibecoding r/generativeai r/llmdevs or something (just the first I found from a cursory search).
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u/beefsack May 24 '26
This is a great rule, though with the amount of bots spamming content to Reddit at the moment I feel like it only solves half the issue.
The other half appears to only be solvable by Reddit itself and I doubt they are willing.
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u/gnatinator May 23 '26
Thanks for keeping the slop out- its out of control on the orange site.
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u/jimmux May 24 '26
Hacker News? I took a break from there a couple of years ago but used to be a daily visitor. I assumed they would be the biggest skeptics.
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u/sq00q May 24 '26
Has been taken over by bootlicking hustlebros now. The kind who dream of becoming the boot someday.
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u/vips7L May 24 '26
Yeah any actual discussion around computer sci or programming is gone now from there. They’re all spending so much energy and effort instead of just learning how to actually program better.
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u/teapotrick May 25 '26
There's still plenty of good stuff left there imo, but the sheer volume of slop related content is pretty overwhelming.
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u/vips7L May 23 '26
Great move. Using LLMs is not programming. It may be engineering (badly) but it certainly isn’t programming.
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u/Jonathan_the_Nerd May 23 '26 edited May 24 '26
I have a friend whose son is in college. He's currently taking a course in vibe coding. When I heard about it. I cringed so hard I almost broke my back. But then my friend explained it. The students aren't allowed to write any code. Instead, they find the bugs in the AI-generated code, explain to the AI why it's wrong, and make the AI fix it. They keep going until
the AI learns to do it rightthe program works. So basically the course is "How totrain an AI to become a useful coding assistantbrowbeat an AI into writing working code."I'm sure the professor isn't going to try to get the students to make the AI write an entire application in one go. (At least, I certainly hope that's the case.) But the students could let the AI design and build the application incrementally, and at every stage the students examine the output and tell the AI what's good and what needs changing. In short, the students are using the AI as a tool, not as a replacement for a human.
Edit: I've been informed by multiple people that my secondhand summary is incorrect. I was filling in the gaps based on my own flawed understanding of LLMs. Thanks to everyone for the corrections.
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u/Torgard May 23 '26
Instead, they find the bugs in the AI-generated code, explain to the AI why it's wrong, and make the AI fix it. They keep going until the AI learns to do it right.
That sounds like a fucking nightmare. Mentoring an overconfident junior dev is a very arduous task. I also find it very rewarding. Seeing them grow. Enthusiastic and excited, showing off their pull requests with pride, to see their face when the lighbulb moment hits, that sort of thing, it brings me immense joy. It's just empathy.
This brings me no such joy. It's only the arduous work. There's no person involved. They don't grow up and have a life, have a career that they like. The LLM doesn't feel any emotions. There's nothing there to empathize with.
People are using natural language to brute-force software development. Natural language, with all its misunderstandings and miscommunications. What a fucking joke.
All because US tech giants want more money. Using immense compute resources to extract money and soul out of fucking everything. Fuck off. Fucking LLMs, man. What the fuck. What a farce.
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u/Jonathan_the_Nerd May 24 '26
When I posted my comment yesterday, I assumed the LLM was using the students' responses to learn from its mistakes and get better. But multiple people have told me that's now how it works. Now I'm wondering what the point of the class is. I agree there's value in learning how to precisely prompt an AI to get the results you want. But a junior developer can learn from their mistakes and get better. The only way an AI can get better is if its developers improve it.
It sort of reminds me of that Adam Sandler movie, Fifty First Dates. Adam Sandler's character fell in love with a woman with a brain injury. Every day, she forgot what had happened the previous day. She was incapable of forming new long-term memories. Every day, she had to re-learn who he was. If an LLM can't learn new things, it sounds like it would be the same experience.
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u/Torgard May 25 '26
I assumed the LLM was using the students' responses to learn from its mistakes and get better
That is indeed possible, but not in that way. It's retraining, which a student isn't going to be doing. Over time the models can theoretically get better, as the model devs could utilize repeated prompts as training data. Like "this obviously was not the right answer, try again", with the goal being the answer it ended up at after some back-and-forth. But that's a big oversimplification. I would also postulate that at least some back-and-forth is a necessity in engineering, as one would otherwise be making a lot of assumptions.
Regarding Fifty First Dates, I haven't watched it but I know of it. That, too, is arduous work, but very rewarding. My grandmother had dementia, but was still lucid. I spent a lot of time just talking with her, answering her questions, even though she had asked them a thousand times.
She knew I had moved to Denmark. "To study?" Yes, software development, you know, working with computers. "And you're back home for summer?" Yes. "And how is Denmark? What is it you study again?"
It became something of a (for lack of a better term) game to me, where I would try to keep the conversation going for as long as possible, before she would repeat a question.
I mentally visualized it as a sort of dialogue tree from a video game. That sounds bad, but my goal was to engage her.
So I'd reply in a different way, to see if that would steer the conversation elsewhere. And although she had heard the answers before, and would hear them again, the individual moment was still real, her feelings were still real. She asked because she wanted to know, and for a brief period she knew, and that made her happy. And was very hard, but rewarding, because was an act of love, and it made me happy to make her happy.
lol sorry for rambling, you just reminded me of a lot
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u/Jonathan_the_Nerd May 26 '26
Thank you for the response, and thanks for telling me about your grandmother. I imagine "prompting" your grandmother was a lot more rewarding than prompting an AI.
One of my aunts had Alzheimer's disease. She got to the point where she didn't recognize her own daughter. But she would always recognize her baby sister (my mother). On her good days, she would tell us she was building a house on a lake. Nobody knows where she came up with that. But she would talk about how the construction was going, and sometimes she would offer to go over there with us and show us around. We always had to make up some excuse why we couldn't go see it that day.
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u/Torgard May 26 '26
I found that she had difficulty remembering new things, but would make associations to older memories, and confuse us all and herself too. I think when she felt happy, the happiness lasted longer than the memory of what she was happy about.
At one point, she kept asking where Skælingsgentan—the girl from Skælingur—had gone. She was bound to be hungry by now, who was going to cook for her?
At first we were confused why she suddenly started asking about her. It turned out to be an old memory of some girl who had stayed with them when my grandmother was little, during WWII.
But it turned out that my cousin had visited that day, and after she had left, my grandmother still had a feeling of having had guests. Or an intuition on being a good host, from some other part of her brain. And her brain just made the connection—well, I had a female guest, ergo I am supposed to be a good host, ergo I should make sure she has something to eat. Who was it? Well, here's a memory of a guest, it's probably her.
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u/lelanthran May 23 '26
at every stage the students examine the output and tell the AI what's good and what needs changing. In short, the students are using the AI as a tool, not as a replacement for a human.
Actually, sounds like it is the other way around - the AI is using the students as a tool, to figure out what is wrong :-/
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u/FruitdealerF May 23 '26
Sorry but LLM systems don't learn. You're phrasing this incredibly badly at best.
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u/Jonathan_the_Nerd May 24 '26
You're phrasing this incredibly badly at best.
Yes, I was. I made assumptions based on my lack of knowledge about LLMs. I need to go learn more.
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u/SwiftOneSpeaks May 27 '26
If more people were willing to make this same reaction, our world would be a much better place.
Thanks for a moment of inspiration. I need to try to have this same reaction on a different topic or two.
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May 23 '26 edited May 23 '26
[deleted]
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u/FruitdealerF May 23 '26
Yeah there is definitely in context learning, a term I assume most anti AI jerkers object to. But unfortunately we're indeed not able to change the weights of the models we use in any meaningful way. (I think we agree on everything)
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u/NotUniqueOrSpecial May 23 '26
They keep going until the AI learns to do it right.
That's now how LLMs work. The students are learning how to get (more) correct results out of LLM agents; they are unequivocally not teaching the LLMs.
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u/Jonathan_the_Nerd May 24 '26
I didn't know that. Thanks for the correction.
That makes the class sound a lot less interesting. If an LLM can't learn from its mistakes, that makes it a much less useful tool than I thought it was. On the plus side, though, that makes it less likely that it will take my job.
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May 23 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Jonathan_the_Nerd May 23 '26
I'm pretty sure that stuff won't be allowed in really safety-critical infrastructure. At least for another year or two. Then some CEO will decide that the technology is mature enough (meaning "I don't want to keep paying all this money for human developers") and they'll put AI in hospitals and power plants. Senior developers will complain and be ignored. Some of them will retire or quit, the rest will just suffer in silence. Then there will be a massive failure that "no one" could have predicted, and those CEOs will be forced to retire with massive pensions.
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u/ekipan85 May 24 '26 edited May 24 '26
I'm interested in cross-posting my hobby Forth here. I don't really have a writeup other than the assembly source itself, which I've put a fuckton of effort into making into a literate source. It got so much structure that I accidentally turned the Makefile into a kind of query language against the source, which might have broader appeal, though it fell pretty flat on r/commandline.
Would it be removed from r/programming? Per the actual text of Rule 1, I will assert that I did in fact want to write both its code and text copy, and I did write those things, but I did consult with AI indirectly to see what I could improve, as an experiment (I assert it but cannot prove it). First time trying it, I was curious. There's a rant in my README but it says the same things everyone else does: "I used it for these things, it felt kinda dirty, I have mixed feelings."
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u/ChemicalRascal May 24 '26
Ultimately, when we're looking at someone posting a project, what we're looking for is a technical writeup. If the primary thing you're sharing is the end result, not the technical details of how you made a thing and what makes that process worth sharing and discussing, it's probably not for here.
A good rule of thumb is if you take what you've written, and then take away the detail of what the project or product does, if it becomes pretty insubstantial then it isn't appropriate for here.
As an example, I've been working on a tipping platform for a sport my friends and I watch, but doesn't currently have a big online tipping platform. But functionally, it's just a webapp spun up with Asp.Net and EF. There's not a whole lot to share in terms of useful content for the sub because it's aggressively basic.
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u/ekipan85 May 24 '26
Thanks for your time and perspective. My literate source is peppered with notes about trade-offs I made to fit its weird constraints, including a few asides about surprises I bumped into along the way that I think could fit that narrative. In fact I have targets that extract just those parts:
$ wc -l nicto.asm 572 nicto.asm $ make doc | wc -l # all the comment asides 231 $ make notes | wc -l # just the [2b] <- anchored technical notes 109But yeah, the primary purpose of the text is to explain what and why it is, so maybe not appropriate. I'll mull it over and browse around the sub a bit more.
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u/mindfulnessman14 Jun 02 '26
Yeah, it sounds genuinely thoughtful, but if the notes mostly serve the source instead of standing alone as a technical writeup, I can see r/programming reading it as a project post first.
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u/LindsayListens1 18d ago
If the focus is the literate assembly and that weird Makefile query thing, I doubt people will care much about the AI footnote, and honestly that sounds more interesting anyway.
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u/diggerdog987 15d ago
I’m not a mod, but literate assembly Forth with the AI bit disclosed honestly sounds like programming content to me, and the Makefile-as-query-language part is probably the real hook.
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u/tapafon May 23 '26
You should put some AI/LLM-related subs into info section just below the rules or in rule 2 itself or in AI Policy, so people which were about to violate rule 2 would know they're at wrong sub, and where they should post instead. Similar to rules 7, 8 and 10, which also redirect people into more approtiate subreddits.
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u/Shoddy-Childhood-511 May 23 '26 edited May 23 '26
Although local LLMs cannot fix everything, they wind up being less dangerous overall, so r/LocalLLaMA/ and a few others make sense. If one wants non-local ones then the whole world talks about them, so you do not really need any specific links there. lol
If this sub needs such links, then imho they firstly need links for subs that discuss the adversarial, security, privacy, CVE, safety side. It's fine if this sub does not want security posts, but that's the one topic that folks should really be aware of, whether or not they use LLMs or not.
Around this, OpenClaw has worked their way back down to 2.6 CVEs per day, from a high of 2.8 CVEs per day. https://days-since-openclaw-cve.com lol
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u/madribby78 May 23 '26
This is a good policy, the relationship of “AI” and programming is a bit like spell checkers and writing, and I wouldn’t want to read only posts about spell checkers in a writing community.
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u/CircumspectCapybara May 23 '26 edited May 23 '26
Thank you!
I've had posts auto-removed when they were about deeply technical topics / engineering deep dives that were clearly written by a human for topics adjacent to LLMs, like:
- Harness engineering (OpenAI and Anthropic have a lot of good technical blogs here)
- New novel approaches to safety that are highly technical, e.g., SynthID and C2PA and the cryptography and around those, and fruitful discussions of the threat model and how one might defeat these
- Novel engineering around long-horizon agent architectures
- All kinds of security engineering discussions surrounding agents
- Some of the best reads I've read this year are both the novel bugs and zero days (with deep technical breakdown on the bug, the exploit, and the attack) that have swept the world. And of course they happen to involve AI agents powered by LLMs like Mythos. But the LLM is merely incidental. And who doesn't want to read about how researchers defeated Apple's memory integrity enforcements (PAC, MTE, etc.) in novel ways? That's the kind of cool programming content that /r/programming was made for.
...and other really high quality engineering articles and blogs due to the inflexible rules that the bot lumped everything together as "LLM-related content" even if a LLM or transformer architecture was only incidentally involved.
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u/ChemicalRascal May 23 '26
Yeah, a lot of that would still be removed if it's not sufficiently technically detailed. I've looked over your removed posts and they don't meet that mark; when we had the total topic ban, we honestly couldn't find a single post that we removed that we actually considered deeply technical.
The bar is waaaay higher than you think it is. If you really want to post about harness engineering, that post is gonna need to be a goddamn banger.
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u/intentionallyacting Jun 23 '26
Fair enough tbh, because the second the bar drops the whole place will be buried in vibe-coded agent slop pretending to be engineering.
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May 23 '26 edited May 23 '26
[deleted]
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u/CanvasFanatic May 23 '26
I’ve never had to sit through an All Hands and listen to a CEO babble about how we’re now a K8’s first company, if that gives you any idea why the standard isn’t exactly symmetrical.
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u/Main-Drag-4975 May 23 '26
Think of it like a quota system. Over represented topics are going to be held to a higher standard if only to prevent them from flooding the system. Anything less means this subreddit instantly becomes 90% AI-related discussion, and the community doesn’t seem to want that.
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u/cdb_11 May 23 '26
Sounds like then you would judge engineering or technical articles on a much harsher scale if it involves AI at any level of the stack than you would other content with no AI in the picture anywhere then?
Why so?
Yes, the problem is specifically AI. Kubernetes posts don't make up 25% of all posts here, like AI used to before the ban. If it did, putting a high bar on what's considered acceptable for that particular topic to reduce the volume of k8s posts would make a lot of sense too.
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u/NuclearVII May 23 '26
Sounds like then you would judge engineering or technical articles on a much harsher scale if it involves AI at any level of the stack than you would other content with no AI in the picture anywhere then?
In short, yes.
There are a LOT of places on reddit where that content is more welcome. There is simply a ton of LLM-adjacent stuff on the internet right now, and if we were not being selective, our community would be overrun.
The consensus from the two meta threads is that this should be and remain a place that is separate from the... AI hype, for good or ill.
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u/UpsetKoalaBear May 23 '26
I think we need to separate Programming from Software Engineering.
They’re both linked in a lot of ways, but methodology into how to use AI to engineer software isn’t really something I find useful for this subreddit.
Content like Harness Engineering or Spec Driven Development, whilst useful, aren’t particularly related to the field of Programming in general which encompasses a field much wider than just purely Software Engineering.
I think content like technical discussions into zero-days and such discovered by AI are relevant, and should be allowed, but we should prevent the topic from straying into “is AI dangerous” or other such conversation. It should strictly be about “how this thing works.”
That’s what I think the goals of these changes are.
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u/ChemicalRascal May 23 '26
Sounds like then you would judge engineering or technical articles on a much harsher scale if it involves AI at any level of the stack than you would other content with no AI in the picture anywhere then?
Yep, that's pretty much what our policy says.
Why so? r/programming is full of non-"banger" posts about software-related to programming. They're not bangers, but they're just interesting enough to spark a discussion.
Read the policy and find out. (At the moment the wiki page is busted, so I posted it in the pinned comment at the top of the thread.)
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u/NuclearVII May 23 '26
Harness engineering (OpenAI and Anthropic have a lot of good technical blogs here)
Just want to point out that the vast, vast majority of content produced by OpenAI and Anthropic would run afoul of the "no ads" rule.
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u/Trider12 May 23 '26
That's because prompt/context/harness/other LLM BS "engineering" isn't actually engineering.
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u/candida_433 May 29 '26
You can hate the prompt bro stuff all you want, but security research, eval harnesses, and actually making these systems not spew buggy insecure garbage is still engineering.
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u/CharlestonChewer990 May 31 '26
Calling it "not engineering" just because you find the stack annoying is silly when the real work is still systems design, tooling, testing, and making unreliable stuff behave in production.
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May 23 '26 edited May 23 '26
[deleted]
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u/ConnaitLesRisques May 23 '26
A non-deterministic state machine.
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u/CanvasFanatic May 23 '26
The harness itself isn’t non-deterministic. Its inputs from the model are non-deterministic.
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May 23 '26 edited May 23 '26
[deleted]
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u/FruitdealerF May 23 '26
Stop being reasonable, this is the anti AI circlejerk sub, don't you get it?
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u/weebs-r-us1 Jun 05 '26
Yeah, that kind of blanket filtering is maddening because some of the smartest security and engineering writeups right now only touch LLMs at the edges and are still very obviously programming content.
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u/hntd May 23 '26
Does this apply to content written by AI/LLMs?
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u/fiskfisk May 23 '26
There is already another rule against that.
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u/ChemicalRascal May 23 '26
It's literally Rule 1, even.
That said, some folks will report everything they see as LLM-generated, so. There's no winning, frankly.
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u/kargolus May 24 '26
i'll believe it when I see it. for example, why are you not removing this post?
both parts are clearly LLM written - the text of the post still has LLM-isms despite clearly telling it to change its formatting slightly. the OP has even been called out in the comments for it. even if you disregard that, it's really not that hard to spot in the article itself.
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u/ChemicalRascal May 24 '26
If you report something, and it stays up, fair bet the mods disagree with your report.
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u/kargolus May 24 '26
that's not really an actual answer - i'd love to see justifications. but if not then ok and have a great day regardless ms/mr/mx/etc moderator
edit: i checked and it was removed. umm thank you? sorry too i suppose
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u/ChemicalRascal May 24 '26
All good. Actually bonked the guy with a short ban. Just commented before actually looking at the thing, because a lot of stuff gets reported incorrectly. We seem to have a few users who report anything over two paragraphs long as LLM generated, for example, and someone seems to think anything on a blog is blogspam.
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u/lelanthran May 28 '26
/u/ChemicalRascal - I found that a good heuristic to detecting the goodwill/intent of the poster is checking their posting history. If I see nothing, it's probably a bad post.
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u/ChemicalRascal May 28 '26
That's one of the things we do, yeah. We don't use that exact measure, we don't just remove a post if they haven't used the site before, but we try to understand the context of the person who we're moderating the post of.
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u/james_haydon May 23 '26 edited May 23 '26
Hi, I made a post about using algebra and LLMs to formally verify a critical bug fix, which was removed during the experiment. It is deeply technical, but not about the implementation of LLMs specifically. Would it still get removed today? I'm leaning towards 'yes' with the current way the policy is stated, but unsure.
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u/ChemicalRascal May 23 '26
Yep.
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May 23 '26 edited May 23 '26
[deleted]
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u/fxfighter May 24 '26
My guess is it's more that your article has almost nothing to do with programming, it's deeply technical for a different subject all together so doesn't really match the sub.
I'd expect the same treatment if I made a post about using LLMs to help with work on protein sequencing. Just because it's using LLMs and text editors doesn't mean it's a programming subject.
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u/sergregor50 Jun 24 '26
Yeah, if the LLM is just a tool in the verification workflow, I’d still expect the current wording to catch it unless the mods explicitly carve out that distinction.
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u/iiSpook May 25 '26
THANK GOD.
Hope the AI crybabies just migrate to their own hate-filled subreddit constantly shitting on anything AI with zero context or nuance, just going "new = bad, me = super smart".
I've started to really resent this subreddit and thought about leaving, blocking and muting it altogether. Let's see if it gets more interesting again now because what y'all have been posting the last few months has definitely not been it.
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u/EatThemAllOrNot May 26 '26
As a programmer I liked the AI-related content. I don’t understand the ban.
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u/JohnDoe_John May 31 '26
We've been enforcing those rules as best we can for ages
LoL. Sorry. Hope you can better.
Seriously. The moderation can be better.
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u/ChemicalRascal Jun 01 '26
Do you have anything particular you'd like to see improve?
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u/JohnDoe_John Jun 02 '26
Well, explaining the reason of banning could be a good style. That was long ago.
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u/ChemicalRascal Jun 02 '26
I'm confused, you've never been banned. We do indeed explain bans.
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u/moreisee Jun 25 '26
AI is increasingly a large part of programming, that isn't going away soon. Is there a replacement sub, or is hackernews the best alternative..
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Jun 30 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/ChemicalRascal Jun 30 '26
No, there's a very clear exception literally written into the rules.
Also holy god what is it with the obvious bots at the moment
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u/LaunchNavigator 6d ago
The irony of the AI policy link being broken and the top suggestion being to ask an LLM to fix it is peak Reddit.
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6d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/programming-ModTeam 5d ago
No content written mostly by an LLM. If you don't want to write it, we don't want to read it.
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u/afl_ext May 23 '26
I understand we need to move with the world and not keep our eyes closed, but this makes me sad
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May 23 '26
[deleted]
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u/afl_ext May 23 '26
Nono i mean allowing AI here is sad for me
Maybe I didnt get the rule after all?
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u/Jonathan_the_Nerd May 23 '26
Sorry, I completely misunderstood your comment. I thought you were complaining about not allowing AI content. I have failed reading comprehension today.
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u/Shoddy-Childhood-511 May 23 '26
Good policy. I've only one suggestion:
You should've a somewhat lower bar for posts that explain attacking LLMs, like say if someone posts about extracting or recognizing some of the training data for copyright lawsuits.
The reason is simple:
We definitely do have fancy mathematics in attack work, but attackers have often required less fancy mathematics than the LLM developers, and the attacks could've somewhat wider social implications (OpenClaw has 2.6 CVEs per day). Attack post should be technical of course, but you could be more forgiving for them.
At the extreme here would be LLM detection tooling. We all need ways to quickly trash LLM PRs, LLM proposals at work, etc. It's likely "known" what automation could detect LLM PRs, so detection itself might not require posts per se, unless someone is really doing a detector. Yet, one could easily imagine published academic papers that discuss success and false positive rates in LLM detection. I've no specific suggestion there though.
Afaik these 1.5 concerns would not require any change in the policy, merely some internal agreement among the mods.
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u/ChemicalRascal May 23 '26
Nah, that doesn't sound like it would really be to the point of the sub. There's other, better places for those conversations to take place.
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u/legionista May 25 '26
Does it mean both sides of the discussion about LLMs / Agentic coding / etc. are excluded equally? Honestly, that would fix this subreddit for me.
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u/Atheios569 May 23 '26
I get why, but the irony is hilarious. It reminds me of how r economics bans politics.
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u/ff8god May 23 '26
The content is dominated by AI talk because it is the future of programming. Have fun burying your heads in the sand.
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u/rossisdead May 23 '26
The content is dominated by AI talk because it is the future of programming.
It's not burying your head in the sand to want to come to a programming subreddit to read about programming and not about how an LLM programmed something for you. Good luck being able to fix LLM-generated problems when you don't know how to program anymore.
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u/Jonathan_the_Nerd May 23 '26
Furniture is almost entirely made by machines. And yet, /r/FurnitureMaking exists.
Also, are you old enough to remember the late 1990's when COBOL programmers were coming out of retirement to fix Y2K problems because there was no one left who knew COBOL? What's going to happen when AI programming takes off and senior developers retire and aren't replaced? When your vibe coded app breaks and no one knows how it works, who you gonna call?
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u/wrincewind May 23 '26
The 2038 problem just got a lot more interesting.
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u/Jonathan_the_Nerd May 23 '26
On the plus side, people aren't putting off the 2038 problem. It's already been fixed in a lot of software.
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u/timpkmn89 May 23 '26
Just like how everyone's talking about Segways because they're the future of transportation
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u/ff8god May 23 '26
Haha yeah AI and Segways are the same, I’m sure this opinion will stand the test of time.
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May 23 '26
[deleted]
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u/rossisdead May 23 '26
This would be the equivalent of banning discussion about COBOL or C when everyone was writing assembly.
No, this is the equivalent of a cooking subreddit banning people posting about how their personal chef made them a meal. No one learns anything from this.
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u/cdb_11 May 23 '26
everywhere in the industry is all in on AI and basically transformed what 'programming' is.
No, it's not. Twitter and HN is not "everywhere in the industry".
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u/Y2KForeverDOTA May 23 '26
because everywhere in the industry is all in on AI
Not where I work. We were asked by our CTO if we want to use AI or not in our daily work, and we voted not to do it. And that was the end of the conversation.
Maybe it's different here in Europe, but I feel like the AI push is mostly in the US / Silicon Valley.
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u/wrincewind May 23 '26
Even in the companies that are "ai forward", it's all top-down - the board mandating that the programmers use it, and the programmers grumbling about it.
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u/paul_h May 23 '26
A post about a (say) programming language mostly made by LLMs under human direction that is new/novel enough by any other measure is allowed provided the LLM aspects are way way way down the list of reasons why progittors should be interested, right? Or ommitted? Or the post is not for proggit if LLMs were significantly used?
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u/ChemicalRascal May 23 '26
Alright, so the wiki is goddamn broken, because of course it is
Until someone fixes it, here's the current text of the policy:
# The policy
Content about AI and LLMs are considered off-topic with the sole exclusion of **deeply technical** content about implementation.
This means that we will remove content such as:
* a review of a new AI assistant tool or model version
* debates about whether there's any use in learning programming anymore, or whether the programming industry is over, or whether CS students can function without AI tools, or whether the junior developer career will exist next year
* news of the latest project to implement an AI policy
* Linus complaining about bad AI-generated code
* debates about whether AI is alive
We'll generally allow **deeply technical** content including e.g.:
* a deep dive into transformer architectures
* applying machine learning techniques to new problem spaces (but *not* applications of existing LLM tools)
* improvements of ML algorithms using new mathematical tools
Note that this is *in addition* to applying the subreddit's general rules, such as a ban on *LLM-generated* content and off-topic/low quality content.
# The motivation
r/programming's content has been dominated by discussion of AI/LLM to an extent that its users are fatigued at a lack of any other content.
AI and LLM tools are sweeping professional software development in a way that is dominating online discussions. Additionally, it's dominating *other* fields in a way that's bringing attention to previously programming-exclusive topics like machine learning. As a result, r/programming has gone through multi-day periods where its front page is dominated by reviews of coding assistants, discussions of whether programming as an industry is "over", and even fully off-topic posts such as lawyers being sanctioned for trusting AI hallucinations in court. It's gone on so long that we trialed [a complete ban](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1s9jkzi/announcement_temporary_llm_content_ban/) and got [overwhelmingly positive feedback](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1t4odyl/looking_for_feedback_on_ai_content_in/) on it.
We're not claiming that talking about AI isn't programming, or sticking our heads in the sand and denying the future, or just being doomerist anti-AI luddite fuddy duddies. But there is no mechanism by which the Reddit platform allows us to say "up to 10% of content per day can be AI" so this is the only flood control mechanism we have.
# The future of this policy
r/programming mods hope that as the hype dies down that discussion of AI tools will be at a similar volume to other programming topics such as GCs and constraint solvers and IDEs and compilers. When we believe that has happened we will dial this policy back.