Reddit 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.

Moderators on a power trip? Fuck 'em.

Do 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.

Sure, but if r/programming can't include the combination/hybrid then the whole subreddit is likely doomed to obsolescence.

That genie's not going back into the lamp.

(Heck, I've leaned on LLMs to generate damned SwiftUI code for me.)

> 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.

They're not banning "AI programming": just specifically large language models.

There genuinely is a lot of interesting discussion to be had about LLMs, and I know this is true because I discuss things with my coworkers daily and learn a lot. I do admit that conversation online about LLMs is frequently lacking. I think it's a bit like politics - everyone has an opinion about it, so unfortunately online discourse devolves to the lowest common denominator. Hey guys, have you noticed that if you use LLMs frequently it's possible you'll forget to think critically?

But "there can't be any interesting discussion about AI programming" is completely false.

My 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.

I 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‘

That isn't why /r/programming banned it. They banned it because every discussion about LLMs inevitably devolves into discussions about AI slop in varying levels of civility, and the rare good LLM submissions/discussions do not offset it.

Other tech-adjacent subreddits such as /r/rust have banned LLM discussion for similar, more pragmatic reasons.

This is far too negative and reductionist

Like saying theres no interesting discussions about programming. Just whether OOP is overhyped, python is slow, how well you can convert a c codebase to rust

You have not seen my recent WhatsApp chats. Me and a pal are talking about what we're doing with Claude code, and it's quite interesting!

Just like discussions about traditional programming never were only about syntax and type systems, AI discussions aren't only about prompts and harnesses. I find there's quite a bit of overlap actually! "How do you approach this problem?" Is a question that is valid in both discussions, for example.

In my experience Opus 4.6 is the best.

Genuine question: how to distinguish yourself from the stream of slop?

I am also annoyed by the endless stream of articles and projects related to LLM-assisted coding. Not because I dislike LLM-assisted coding as an idea, but because it's all more of the same (as you said). I think that there are still a lot of low-hanging fruit in improving LLM harnesses that no one is working on because everyone seems to be chasing the latest trends ("agentic", "multiagentic", "skills") without thinking bigger.

But I'm afraid that if I finally invest time and implement some of my ideas on making LLM-assisted coding better (reliable, safer, easier for humans to interpret and understand generated code), I won't be able to gather any feedback. People will simply dismiss it as "yet another slop for creating more slop" and that's it.

What is the way out of this conundrum?

> or how well you can manage 16 parallel agents.

Claude does that for me. :)

I use LLMs yet I don't care to read about them or their usage at all. I can certainly see the reason why a place called "/r/programming" wouldn't want to have discussion about agent usage either, since it's not programming, it's a different activity.

This seems to be a matter of industry and a perspective, like saying everyone loves chocolate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum

I have no reason to believe AI is used as much or as widely as you claim.

In my industry AI is fully available and was almost forced on us, and yet nobody is using it. The process of using AI and then scrutinizing the output is just more work than doing it manually. The most I encounter AI is when running job interviews and watching candidates read AI generated answers off a screen.

My industry also tends to skew much older than where I came from previously writing JavaScript full time. We are also fully remote with lots of status meetings. If I were less confident in my ability to communicate in writing maybe I would be more inclined to use AI.

I also don’t really envision AI accomplishing my multitude of daily managerial and administrative assignments that I have in addition to agile stories and writing code. Comparatively, writing code is the trivial part.

I think they just don't want every post to be about llm, vibe coding, harness and if claude is down.

Some sub reddits forbid memes, because else they get flooded and the good content drowns in it.

Some sub reddits only allow certain content of certain days to counter this.

What do you want to mods to do?

It may not be a, in denial, hiding their heads in the sand situation.

Sometimes a topic gets too popular, it drowns out all the other topics. At that point, aren't they just a glorified version of r/llm?

I'll give you one personal example:

The year Caitlin Clark was drafted to the wnba.

r/wnba went from a subreddit of 9000, to eventually 200k subs.

We were bombarded with CC posts every hour.

- Some of it was trolls staging a race war (this was during US elections).

- Some of it was genuine CC fans, who wanted to talk about CC.

- Some of it was bball nerds, who you know... wanted to talk about a bball player in a bball forum (regardless of who that bball player happens to be).

So what happened was, at any given day, 80% of the front page was CC content.

At that point, we might as well have been r/caitlinclark.

So the mods did something drastic and controversial. They banned all "low effort" CC content.

WTF does "low effort" mean? It pretty much meant 99% of CC posts got removed.

The forum went back to something that resembled a bball forum. That talked about other players. And other teams. Not just Caitlin Clark.

> We are SO past the point of software being developed without LLMs at _all_

That's exactly why I've given up on programming, development or career subreddits. There are a lot of interesting software engineering challenges opening up, but instead of discussing it like professionals it all gets drowned in a big negative mixture of rants against the financial AI bubble, companies using AI as an excuse to lay off, and a general antiwork vibe. All these subreddits have become feel good/bad echo chambers for angry teens and students with no real world professional experience.

> 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.

I can't tell this is a joke or not. Do people really care? Or maybe the U.S. thing? At least in my country nobody cares....

lol yeah the people running the programming subreddit don't understand social context, who could have guessed?

I have yet to run into any serious project in the wild that is using LLMs for development. I have seen vibecoded intern prototypes that took half a day to vet and dismiss because they were completely useless.

I'm sure your experience is different, but you can't _seriously_ claim we're "past the point" of not using LLMs for programming.

Vibecoding is a fundamentally different kind of activity than actual programming. It's a pure delusional dopamine rush, compared to the deliberate engineering required to build quality software.

I hate AI video, I hate AI art, but if you are pretending that AI isn’t going be writing code for 99% of projects going forward you are absolutely kidding yourself.

I know LLM generated code comes with it's own challenges, but the absolutists are definitely clinging to a time that has passed. I saw a recent discussion on Immich where a maintainer flatout denied a PR saying "That diff looks LLM-generated to me; is that indeed the case? If so, we'd prefer not to receive a PR for it" The PR was from a professional software engineer, who worked weeks of his free time on a big feature. Well structured + tested. Dismissed just because AI was used. https://github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions/23745#discu...

> I don't understand the people digging in as zero LLM absolutists.

Relevant read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

I feel like it’s easy to understand what’s motivating these individuals to take that stance.

Yeah, the smaller subreddits are good. The problem is it’s basically killed off alternative forums.

I never thought I’d miss vBulletin so much.

Think any platform becomes terrible over time once it hits a certain level of mass appeal. I loved Reddit and Quora in 2010.

It was inevitable given it's a top 7 most popular site.

The reality is, the masses, the real world, the average person. Is an asshole.

It doesn't reflect in the real world, because people learn to hide their assholeness at a very early age (Or they learn how to get punched in the face).

On an anonymous forum. You don't have to hide your assholeness.

Frankly it's amazing the site never devolved into 4chan. I attribute that to all the people doing free labor --> mods.

They switched their best sorting algorithm to be engagement based rather than upvote based [1]. Upvotes are just one of many metrics, but heavy comment interaction is another. It incentivizes rage bait and performing for the crowd with every comment and post. They also switched into an almost purely moderator curated frontpage [2] rather than allowing users to vote.

1: https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/o5tjcn/evolving_the_b...

2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36040282

You should try Lemmy. It feels a lot like Reddit did in like 2012. Small, but a great community.

I'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.

Reddit turned way more into an echo chamber over time. The moderators and the downvote system destroyed the site. The shift from free speech, libertarian and anarchist ideology into heavily left leaning definitely didn't help.

> 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.

Favourite 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.

See dang’s comments on 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.”)

I've been hiding them all. Makes the front page look a lot better.

I can foresee new subreddit rule: 'Stop complaining "This is turning into the orange site". Just report the slop.'

How the tables turn.

I 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.

Nope:

> Timing just worked out this way. New month, ideal timing for testing a new rule.

Not to worry, the security problems were patched out (with the help of "grumpy-AI", of course): https://gitlab.com/g33kphr33k/musicgrabber/-/commit/a1cb0c0e...

https://lobste.rs/

...Hacker News?

The original post was edited with "this is not April Fool's"

Unlike 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.

What do you recommend instead? Reddit is like reading YouTube comments nowadays, I miss when discussions were literate and informed.

I wouldn't call them 'people'.

Ignorance isn't bliss. They never had a downturn yoy in their userbase yet.

> /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?

/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.

It'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.

More like /r/cars bans all discussion of electric cars.

OK 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.

Do you think that this is not happening here?

If you email comment links to the mods that you believe are AI-assisted, they’ll review and act on that. Footer contact link. It’s not hopeless.