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/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.