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r/programming bans all discussion of LLM programming
- johnb95 6mo agoSeems like they found a solution: https://www.reddit.com/r/llmprogramming/ https://www.reddit.com/r/llmprogramming/
- austin-cheney 6mo agoThat sounds absolutely amazing. I will reconsider creating a new account and using Reddit again after walking away about a decade ago.
- 59nadir 6mo agoI deleted my account a few years ago, I might actually create one now, it'll be preferable to HN if they stick with this new rule.
- rjendjdjjdk 6mo ago[dead]
- SadErn 6mo ago[dead]
- feverzsj 6mo agoHN should also limit all these self-promoting AI posts.
- CodeCompost 6mo agoI've been hiding them all. Makes the front page look a lot better.
- WalterGR 6mo agoSee dang’s comments on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079 . (That link itself is a submission about HN’s recent guidelines changes to include “Don't post generated comments or AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans.”)
- sph 6mo agoFavourite genres of posts on HN in the past 2 years: * “I am bullish about AI” * “I am an AI skeptic, [long rambling], but overall, I am bullish about AI” It’s amazing how even criticism of the technology somehow ends up being a hype post. At least there are still places on the Internet where we can have a serious discussion about the downsides.
- minimaxir 6mo agoAs someone who wrote recently wrote the latter post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47183527 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47183527), the more nuanced approach that "AI has good and bad things" is a more real-world reflective approach than an absolute "AI is good" or "AI is bad", and at the least it's more conductive for civil discussion.
- sph 6mo agoI disagree, but I am the outlier here. I prefer strong opinions than the academic conclusion that a thing has some good parts and some bad parts. I feel 99% of modern essays are afraid to take a stance about anything, and it makes for uninteresting reading and even less interesting discussion. To be fair, my issue with the born-again AI skeptic genre of posts is that it's basically clickbait. As if being a skeptic at one point makes your argument stronger, proving that the hype is real, and one should pay attention. It's intellectually dishonest, even if meant in earnest. (Your post history shows that you have been anything but an AI skeptic. Case in point about intellectual dishonesty.)
- jaredcwhite 6mo ago"Asbestos has good and bad things" "Assault rifles in the hands of ordinary citizens has good and bad things" "Everyday chemicals in the food supply has good and bad things" Look, some issues require nuance. Others don't. It's gaslighting to tell activists who consider Big AI to be a net negative for society (by an order of magnitude!) that their position isn't "real-world reflective".
- pamcake 6mo agoI can foresee new subreddit rule: 'Stop complaining "This is turning into the orange site". Just report the slop.' How the tables turn.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- brokegrammer 6mo agoReddit is doomed anyway. People are using AI to start threads, and other people are using AI to comment on these threads. You can never know what you're interacting with.
- _fs 6mo agoDo you think that this is not happening here?
- siva7 6mo agoGot any proof?
- charcircuit 6mo agoCheck a larger thread. It is pretty clear since there are people doing nothing to hide the writing style.
- 21asdffdsa12 6mo agoYou are absoawesomeamazingaffirmativeabundantauthenticabsolutely right!
- JumpCrisscross 6mo ago> Check a larger thread. It is pretty clear It tends to get downvoted and flagged.
- siva7 6mo agoI got a pretty interesting ai detection demo run through historic HN data, would love to see if HN could make use of this tech for HN. But i have no clue how to reach out or who might be a contact here.
- JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
- siva7 6mo agoSweet, so the LLM can interact on topics not about LLM
- whytevuhuni 6mo agoMaybe this was a genius move made precisely to be ambiguous on whether it was April Fools or not... so that the author can later read the room and clarify whether it was or was not April Fools, without much repercussion either way.
- altairprime 6mo agoNope: > Timing just worked out this way. New month, ideal timing for testing a new rule.
- lifthrasiir 6mo agoOr so one says. (Not necessarily saying that it was a bad decision.)
- altairprime 6mo agoWhat evidence of malice supports your claims here? (Evidence-free conspiracy theories are generally unwelcome at HN.)
- moralestapia 6mo agoPeople still use Reddit?
- BoredPositron 6mo agoIgnorance isn't bliss. They never had a downturn yoy in their userbase yet.
- minhaz23 6mo agoBut hasnt it gone down in quality with broader mainstream appeal, more ai slop, and just general self promotion? I feel like a lot of niche communities have also lost their core or original user bases that are not as active any more or it could just be me? For example off the top of my head not digging too deep, r/juststart used to be very high signal and strongly moderated but now not so much. But, on the other hand, i did discover r/laundry recently with some awesome content around “spa day” but again thats mainly one user responsible. I guess another big gripe is having to use the reddit mobile app after they closed their api’s and shutting down third party apps because now i cant browse its more feed-like. Sorry for the ramble not sure what my point is but hoping others can share their experiences and any advice too i guess
- huhkerrf 6mo agoI'm not sure how you can claim that going more mainstream would decrease the quality of a site that gave us "we did it reddit!" and "the bacon narwhals at midnight".
- voxl 6mo agoYou think this place, the people in my circles infamously refer to as the "orange site", is considered a bastion of good conversation among the people that don't frequent it?
- calf 6mo agoWhat do you recommend instead? Reddit is like reading YouTube comments nowadays, I miss when discussions were literate and informed.
- mudkipdev 6mo agoThere can't be any interesting discussion about AI programming. Every conversation boils down to what skill files you use, or how Opus 4.6 compares to Codex, or how well you can manage 16 parallel agents.
- wuiheerfoj 6mo agoI disagree and you could reduce basically anything to this: 'there can‘t be any interesting discussion about React. Every conversation boils down to which framework you use or how you manage state or whether you use typescript or javascript‘
- kennywinker 6mo agoAll of those are opinions about programming. Which framework, which language, etc. Conversations about which model to use aren’t conversations about programming. A better analogy would be some topic that you can’t discuss without it boiling down to which text editor you should use. It’s related to programming, a little. But it’s not programming.
- austin-cheney 6mo agoThat is exactly why I left reddit. r/javascript had almost completely abandoned JavaScript discussions for React and Angular while r/programming was half filled with irrational JavaScript fear nonsense.
- geraneum 6mo agoMy pet peeve with all LLM discourse is whenever someone mentions any problem they experience with LLMs or any mistake they make, someone comments that humans make the same mistake.
- hperrin 6mo agoAnd the difference is that humans will learn not to make that mistake anymore.
- altairprime 6mo ago> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills. If only, just this once, it were true. Sigh.
- simianwords 6mo agoThere’s something off about Reddit. Either I grew up or it became hollow from within. Just angry people scolding each other all the time. There are some true gems however but usually in smaller focused subreddits.
- adi_kurian 6mo agoThink any platform becomes terrible over time once it hits a certain level of mass appeal. I loved Reddit and Quora in 2010.
- schnitzelstoat 6mo agoYeah, the smaller subreddits are good. The problem is it’s basically killed off alternative forums. I never thought I’d miss vBulletin so much.
- yvdriess 6mo agosomethingaweful forums are still very much alive
- sublinear 6mo agoI've wondered the same thing, but you growing up definitely has to be a factor. > Just angry people scolding each other all the time. This really does describe it perfectly. I don't know about others, but focusing on my career pulled me out of a relatively low-income and dysfunctional environment. Reddit too often reminds me of people I used to know in real life. It's been so many years since then, and finding and living a better life was so intertwined with my young adulthood that I almost convinced myself people like that don't exist in real life anymore. I thought the whole world had moved on, but search results nowadays prioritize Reddit enough that I'm routinely proven wrong. Contrary to popular belief, I don't think most of the stuff on there is fake. Those people probably really are like that. Certain ways of thinking can become so normalized that they don't even see what there is to be ashamed about. What I sense the most on there is a lot of stress and the resulting irrational fears that pour out of people when they feel too much pressure. People under a seemingly endless and vague threat will go a little nuts and start to swat at anything that disturbs their worldview.
- NietTim 6mo agoNot being able to discuss the biggest change to our job in living memory is such a reddit thing to do, just sticking their heads in the sand.
- ratrace 6mo ago[dead]
- faserx 6mo ago/r/horsecarriage bans all discussion of cars /r/assembly bans all discussion of 4GL LLM programming isn't going away by not talking about it. It's time to move on, and eventually considering farming.
- xboxnolifes 6mo ago/r/horsecarriages banning discussion of cars makes sense though. It's not a horse carriage. If you want to discuss cars, go to /r/cars.
- lelanthran 6mo ago> /r/horsecarriage bans all discussion of cars Makes sense. If I'm looking to read discussions about stables selection, feed prices, etc, why would discussions of spark plugs be relevant? > /r/assembly bans all discussion of 4GL Also makes sense; people wanting to discuss register allocation, bit twiddling, etc probably aren't interested in insurance claims taxonomies or similar. > LLM programming isn't going away by not talking about it. Right, but is the context still /r/programming? After all, there are tons of subreddits you can go to to discuss LLM programming. Why do you need to shove it into a space created for human thoughts on programming? > It's time to move on, and eventually considering farming. Okay, understood, but my question still stands - why conflate programming with viber-coding?
- vlaaad 6mo agoMore like /r/cars bans all discussion of electric cars.
- rzmmm 6mo agoIt's not about wishing it goes away, it's that people don't want to see JavaScript/Java/Swift blog articles when they visit r/assembly.
- faserx 6mo agoOK I see your point, the problem is more being off-topic rather than the LLM programming itself. And that's correct, we are strict people, after all.
- kstenerud 6mo agoThis is to be expected. There's a definite split in the engineering community between those who are embracing AI, and those who are rejecting it. It's now become political, like systemd and wayland.
- tovej 6mo agoI have not met any engineer who is actually embracing LLMs. I have met managers and interns who are.
- AlexeyBelov 6mo agoEven people who are actively embracing it don't want to have 95% of all submissions in most dev-related subs be LLM-adjancent. There are separate subreddits for that, just like there are subreddits about MacOS and Linux specifically, despite a huge number of devs using those OSes. Also, most discussions about AI / LLMs on career or general programming subreddits are not what I would call productive. I _want_ new useful information about this topic, but I know I won't get it as things are right now.
- tuhgdetzhh 6mo ago[flagged]
- AlexeyBelov 6mo agoI'm not posting LLM comments. Stop bothering me.
- pscanf 6mo agoI gave up on r/programming after an article I wrote (thoughtfully, without AI, even though the content might not have been super interesting) got mod-slapped with a stickied comment "This content is low quality, stolen, blogspam, or clearly AI generated". Ironically, that comment was added three months after I posted the article, when it was nowhere near the front page anymore, in a clearly automated and AI-driven review. Still salty about it.
- JKCalhoun 6mo agoModerators on a power trip? Fuck 'em.
- JuniperMesos 6mo agoReddit is a low-quality platform, the sorts of people who would be interested in moderating a popular subreddit like r/programming are even less fit to be moderators than the average moderator is. It would be better if people completely stopped using the platform.
- remohexa 6mo agoI mean, I don't really like the platform either. But what kind of alternatives that have the same number of traction do we have?
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- gavinray 6mo agoIt's useful for syndicating your self-hosted blog content so that when people Google topics your stuff shows up. I generally fire-and-forget on Reddit, except for more niche communities where sometimes domain experts actually comment
- ModernMech 6mo agoDo you think maybe it's the disclosure about self promotion you added? You explicitly say the purpose of the blog post is to promote your consultancy, so that might be why they marked it blogspam. I know it feels like you're being forthright, but really that you're promoting yourself is implicit in the fact it's a personal blog, so you can leave that out and still be honest.
- pi-victor 6mo agoAs others have noticed in the thread, the timing is suspicious - could be April's fools.
- minimaxir 6mo agoThe original post was edited with "this is not April Fool's"
- jyrkesh 6mo agoI know this snarky, I'm sorry ahead of time. But I don't know how else to make this point... The fact that the people running r/progamming don't know not to wait until April 2 to publish this tells me that they don't have real-world experience in shipping software in a business environment. We are SO past the point of software being developed without LLMs at _all_, the trend line is never going to reverse. I don't understand the people digging in as zero LLM absolutists.
- klustregrif 6mo ago> I don't understand the people digging in as zero LLM absolutists. Relevant read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite I feel like it’s easy to understand what’s motivating these individuals to take that stance.
- yoz-y 6mo agoDefinitely not the same. Luddites were fighting for humane working conditions; breaking machines was just a means to an end. They weren’t doing it because machines were the problem. Anti AI crowd on the other hand just doesn’t like AI. A modern equivalent of a Luddite would be someone going on strike to protest firings.
- southerntofu 6mo agoYou are being overly dismissive of a mindset you obviously don't understand. Of course being anti-AI is about decent living conditions for humans. Most of us don't believe in singularity or Matrix-style threats. But current AI is actively destroying our breathable/livable planet by drawing unmatched quantities of resources (see also DRAM shortage, etc), all the while exploiting millions of non-union workers across the world (for classification/transcription/review), and all this for two goals: 1) try to replace human labor: problem is we know any extracted value (if at all) will benefit the bourgeoisie and will never be redistributed to the masses, because that's exactly what happened with the previous industrial revolutions (Asimov-style socialism is not exactly around the corner) 2) try to surveil everyone with cameras and microphones everywhere, and build armed (semi-)autonomous robots to guard our bourgeois masters and their data centers There is nothing in this entire project that can be interpreted to benefit the workers. People opposing AI are just lucid about who that's benefiting, and in that sense the luddite comparison is very appropriate.
- simianwords 6mo agoA question to people here: what’s a smallish community for tech with a slightly more serious level of discourse that this subreddit?
- minimaxir 6mo ago...Hacker News?
- veqq 6mo agohttps://lobste.rs/ https://lobste.rs/
- simianwords 6mo agoCan y’all give me an invite
- allanmacgregor 6mo agoLobste.rs is against AI in a pretty fanatical way and most posts have little to no discussion, also good luck accessing them if you use Brave Browser
- throwawaypath 6mo agoClankers outta here! Wish there was an HN toggle to enable hiding all LLM programming submissions.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- viccis 6mo agoI created an account and started reading this site primarily for programming news when r/programming took a precipitous dive in quality around 2020 or so. Before it was an example of one of the few good communities there, but it quickly became show and tell (ironically this was against its unenforced rules). And any real interesting posts had no discussion. But then I noticed the "Other Communities" tab would show posts from a HN posts sub that tracked posts here, and suddenly I was able to get great information. A post about CockroachDB that had 20 boorish comments complaining about its name over there would have the designer of it over here answering technical questions about its capabilities. THAT SAID, I think this might be what gets me to go back to that place. I used to come here to read about new Python tooling, latest database development news, interesting thinkpieces on development practices, etc. Now it's dominated by AI evangelism, "I'm Showing HN™ What I Used By Claude Tokens On :)", AI complaining, AI agent strategies, AI's impacts on the industry news, etc. There are some non-AI posts but not as many good ones as there used to be, and a lot of the non-AI posts quickly turn out to be AI written. Because they respect their time as a writer greatly and my time as a reader not at all. It's ClankerNews, the Hackers are in short supply.
- eddythompson80 6mo agoIf you enjoy comedy, you should check the status of subreddits like /r/selfhosted or /r/homelab, etc. I find them interesting because they are on the edge of computers pro-users and software developers. Used to be a nice community Now it’s people sharing AI apps that look exactly like other AI apps that they have never heard of [1] Project rise then implode hilariously in a month [2] An ebook management project that grew over a year with pretty conservative feature set, then in 3 months implements every ebook feature under the sun, breaks every thing, then implodes. Funniest thing is when the “AI Slop” callout is itself AI written and no body notices. [3] Like… amazing comedy. Then after the owner deletes the repo, 10 people have to role-play the hero who “has the code” because clicking Fork on GitHub is the sign of a true hacker. [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1r9s2rn/musicgrabber_v204_released/ https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1r9s2rn/musicgr... [2] https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1rckopd/huntarr_your_passwords_and_your_entire_arr_stacks/ https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1rckopd/huntarr... [3] https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1rs275q/psa_think_hard_before_you_deploy_booklore/ https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1rs275q/psa_thi...
- duskdozer 6mo agoNot to worry, the security problems were patched out (with the help of "grumpy-AI", of course): https://gitlab.com/g33kphr33k/musicgrabber/-/commit/a1cb0c0e22acfd51ed228aea38ad44088bcd10cc https://gitlab.com/g33kphr33k/musicgrabber/-/commit/a1cb0c0e...
- yoz-y 6mo agoGood decision. AI programming is fundamentally different from programming and as such the discussions merit to have separate forums. If r/programming wants to be the one solely focusing on programming then power to them. Discussing both in combination also makes sense, but the value of reddit is having a subreddit for anything and “just programming” should be on the list.
- redox99 6mo ago> AI programming is fundamentally different from programming It's really not. Maybe vibecoding, in its original definition (not looking at generated code) is fundamentally different. But most people are not vibe coding outside of pet projects, at least yet.
- hperrin 6mo agoIt very much is. It’s more like telling an intern what to do and then reviewing their code. Anyone can do it, and it results in (mostly) slop.
- yoz-y 6mo agoHopefully this does not devolve into ‘nuh-uh’-‘it is too’ but I disagree. Even putting aside the AI engineering part where you use a model as a brick in your program. Classic programming is based on assumption that there is a formal strict input language. When programming I think in that language, I hold the data structures and connections in my head. When debugging I have intuition on what is going on because I know how the code works. When working on somebody else’s code base I bisect, I try to find the abstractions. When coding with AI this does not happen. I can check the code it outputs but the speed and quantity does not permit the same level of understanding unless I eschew all benefits of using AI. When coding with AI I think about the context, the spec, the general shape of the code. When the code doesn’t build or crashes the first reflex is not to look at the code. It’s prompting AI to figure it out.
- phpnode 6mo agoThis is the same argument that people used to have against compilers
- redox99 6mo agoThe takes on LLM programming on reddit are hilarious and borderline sad. It's way past the point of denial, now into delusions. They truly believe LLMs are close to useless and won't improve. They believe it's all just a bubble that will pop and people will go back to coding character by character.
- petercooper 6mo agoWe also believe that, generally, the community have been indicating that, by and large, they aren't interested in this content. How can that be true? Reddit is vote-based. So if people weren't interested, they wouldn't vote it up and it wouldn't appear on the front page. Hacker News has no rule banning posts about Barbie and yet, amazingly, Barbie rarely makes it to the front page, because that's how upvotes work. People clearly are interested enough to vote LLM related posts up, but a bunch of mods who don't like AI are upset enough to want to dictate what others can find interesting. Which is not unusual for Reddit.
- minimaxir 6mo agoUnlike Hacker News, Reddit's new Best algorithm often surfaces newly posted post (which is a good idea that help mitigate the cold start problem), but that means people who are subscribed to /r/programming will see posts about LLMs and typically downvote them. From the user responses to the linked ban, said ban was a positive decision for that community.
- AlexeyBelov 6mo agoIf you rely on votes you get the lowest denominator posts only. See default subreddits. This is very well known failure mode.
- hperrin 6mo agoGood for them. Keep your projects human made by adopting a good policy. I use this one: https://sciactive.com/human-contribution-policy/ https://sciactive.com/human-contribution-policy/
- TheChaplain 6mo agoSeems a lot of commenters here dislike their decision, I like it though. LLM-generated projects, articles, blogs are low-effort products lacking authenticity. And the discussion on LLM itself can in the long run be fairly tiring, follow r/LocalLLaMA for a while and you'll see what I mean. But if you are really into LLMs though, that sub is great. It is simply not fun to go on to a subreddit, seeing 90% being projects and blogs that is obviously created using AI, and authentic content being pushed to the side due to the high volume of artificial works. r/Python was horrible at one point, but the mods have been stepping up their game.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- allanmacgregor 6mo ago> LLM-generated projects, articles, blogs are low-effort products lacking authenticity. I think this is mostly true but not completely true, LLMs are a tool and right now we are learning how to use it, how to use it well and more importantly how not to use them.
- 948382828528 6mo ago[dead]
- nromiun 6mo agoI had almost forgotten about that subreddit. Sadly it has been in a zombie state for years now. Despite having millions of members you can hardly find even 100+ comments on any post in the front page. Last time I checked only political posts (like related to offshore programmers) got any kind of attention. Most technical posts barely gets 10 comments. Some of the smaller subreddits (like /r/ProgrammingLanguages) are much better.
- AlexeyBelov 6mo agoIt's badly moderated (not enough mod resources or something). There is essentially only one mod. Bad comments have a 99.9% chance of not being moderated out at all, and that killed my interest in participation
- humanlity 6mo agoI think good content is generated by deep thought, not by repeating what an LLM says IMHO, Mitchell Hashimoto[^1] is a good example for the community to learn how to cooperate with modern LLMs. [^1]: https://github.com/mitchellh https://github.com/mitchellh
- kelnos 6mo agoWow that's lovely. Wish we could do that on HN for a bit. (Yes, I know, I can install an extension or something to hide LLM/AI submissions. I don't want to, and that's not the same thing, and won't have the same effect.) I use LLMs, I think they are useful, but oh my sweet jesus I am so tired of reading and hearing about them everywhere.
- Vektorceraptor 6mo agoStrange, that they didn't provide a link to an LLM subreddit or the right place, where to discuss LLMs ...
- hu3 6mo agoI think they are just too lazy to mod slop/flamewars posts and comments about LLM . Which is fair but just be honest about it. /r/programming was already unappealing because they tend to be late to surface interesting content in comparison to HN.
- classified 6mo agoOne could argue that having an LLM churn out code is not programming.