Looking for feedback on AI content in r/programming and the April no-AI trial

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TrespassersWilliam@reddit

It was nice to have a break to read about the world of programming beyond LLMs, but I don't see it as a sustainable policy if you want this to be a subreddit about programming in general. LLMs have wide adoption in the field, not always for best, but not always for the worse either. It seems like discussion is important for devs to understand and navigate their use.

At the same time, the sentiment here seems to be that it was a positive change. I understand the fatigue with LLM related topics. I think the policy transforms this subreddit from a general programming discussion space into more of a niche focus. If that fits with the goal of the subreddit, it is fine. Maybe some kind of occasional LLM-related megathread or certain day of the week where LLM posts are welcome would provide the best balance.

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Dragdu@reddit

I found the trial positive overall.

Re categories: I think it all reduces to "good posts are good, bad posts are bad", but then the mods have to use their judgement on whether a post is good enough to be kept, which will then be relitigated endlessly.

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daishi55@reddit

I understand wanting to have a space for technical discussions minus AI. But is r/programming the proper space for that?

i mean, can you call it r/programming with a straight face when discussion of the most consequential development in the history of programming since at least the internet is banned?

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oridb@reddit

But is r/programming the proper space for that?

Yes.

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daishi55@reddit

Can you explain why? Or respond to what I said about why it’s not?

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oridb@reddit

Because purchasing diffs from Anthropic is not programming.

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PracticeAccording274@reddit

the april trial felt pretty good tbh, less noise in the feed and more actual programming discussions instead of endless "will ai replace us" posts

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emboss_@reddit

I agree, but I 'd be willing to read even a "will AI replace us" post, if - and only if - it has something new to say. But I bet it's hard for mods to draw a line that doesn't feel subjective...

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currentscurrents@reddit

I think AI discussions are a waste of time at this point. It's just the same tired talking points repeated over and over again by extremely opinionated people for 800 comments per thread.

"yes it will replace us" "no it won't replace us", the fact is nobody knows how this is going to turn out. But we sure love to argue about it.

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Norphesius@reddit

The ways its getting used are also changing rapidly, to the point where actually decent AI articles become irrelevant almost immediately. Whose models can do what things at what prices in what ways, has a different answer every week it seems like. When things stabilize and the hype dies down, we'll be able to get actually thoughtful articles about the topic.

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currentscurrents@reddit

True. In only a few months, the Curl project flipped 180 degrees from 'why won't the AI slop bug reports stop' to 'AI is great at finding bugs, actually, and the reports it produces are very high quality'.

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Amndeep7@reddit

I feel like that's not a flip in opinion.

The former is people just abusing a platform that would potentially give them money if they submitted anything and everything the AI said was a bug in the off chance it was true. This was understandably overwhelming the Curl maintainers.

The latter is a belief in the judicious use of AI where it is easily and quickly able to parse large blocks of text and do pattern matching quickly and where someone experienced properly assesses the output, i.e. using AI as a tool, will make it effective at finding and resolving bugs.

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Windyvale@reddit

Just add money

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lizardhistorian@reddit

That would be off-topic for programming.

The relevant material would be stuff about all the tooling now available for planning and coding.
How to optimize algorithms with CUDA.
Plenty of things with vLLM, VLA, RAG, CCN, et. al.

LLMs are the least interesting AI models that exist now.

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AshuraBaron@reddit

This is the problem right here. Too many people think these posts were running wild, and they weren't. So legitimate posts about LLM's get nuked instead. The sub is just becoming more insulated and I've had enough.

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phillipcarter2@reddit

They absolutely were running wild, but that was largely a consequence of not enough moderation.

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ketralnis@reddit (OP)

"Will ai replace us" has always been disallowed. A confounding influence is that in the last month or so the new mods really got ramped up. I was removing things like that before but on a large delay, whereas now we're better able to enforce the rules we already had.

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thicket@reddit

Thanks for the work y'all do. I know it's a slog sometimes

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Olive_Plenty@reddit

first off, thank you for your efforts and time. seriously, mods are taken for granted and treated as if they get paid to do what they do. Secondly, please keep the ban going. At the end of the day, we can not say we can't have these ai related discussions. However, we can 100% say not to have it here. someone can make a r/programmingWithAi and those discussions could be had there. period. end of story.

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falconfetus8@reddit

I really enjoyed it.

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Ok_Chemistry_6387@reddit

Please keep it. It is about the only refuge on the internet these days.

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ObligationUnlikely42@reddit

love this approach. does it scale beyond the simple cases?

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ChezMere@reddit

There are some rather important posts that this would ban, e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1t7it4t/mozilla_behind_the_scenes_hardening_firefox

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kaeshiwaza@reddit

We should keep real programmers if vibe coders still want to grab working code.

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szy1840@reddit

I’d keep the ban by default and only carve out the boring infra posts. Eval pipelines, rollback paths, latency debugging, testing weird failure modes — that’s programming. "best prompting practices" and wrapper launch posts just turn into SEO sludge fast.

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xoz1@reddit

idk but no ai for translate?, i don't use it but sometimes we need to, even google translate now it's using gemini us i know because months ago google translate added an option to choose advance translate model or something like that and the standard one, so maybe you can block the ai code generation and ai image generation but translate?, for someone who sometimes use ai for translate some words that i don't know how to say it in english that is a very bad rule ngl,

so yeah please leave the translate alone

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Unlikely_Rich1436@reddit

banning ai discussion entirely because of the wrapper spam is basically throwing the baby out with the bathwater. the literature on multi-agent architectures and securing foundational software against ai fuzzing is some of the most critical engineering work happening right now. we just need heavier moderation on the low-effort posts, not a blanket ban on the tech itself.

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programming-ModTeam@reddit

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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spoki-app@reddit

The April trial period notably improved the signal-to-noise ratio within the subreddit, enhancing the utility of technical discourse for complex problem-solving. The proliferation of LLM-generated content frequently prioritises superficial coherence over a demonstrable understanding of underlying architectural considerations or data integrity requirements. From an integration engineering perspective, where the precision of API contracts and the guarantee of idempotency are paramount, the lack of verifiable technical depth in much of the LLM output is problematic for fostering meaningful discussion. While strategic automation is a key interest, current LLM-driven responses often fall short of the rigorous validation needed for robust system design, inadvertently promoting patterns that could introduce significant technical debt or latency issues. Focusing discussions on human-validated insights and rigorously tested methodologies serves the community more effectively than speculative or unverified LLM-derived suggestions.

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programming-ModTeam@reddit

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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JohnDoe_John@reddit

Offtop: https://rmoff.net/2026/05/06/ai-slop-is-killing-online-communities/

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TaroEld@reddit

I think having a general purpose 'Programming' subreddit that doesn't allow discussion of one of the most important programming-related developments in a long while makes little sense.

Also, food for thought - the april trial might have caused people that would have liked to discuss the topic to move to different places, so you're kind of consulting a biased sample now.

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ChrisRR@reddit

100% keep it. The issue was every single comments section just fell into the same arguments.

There was no point in people making the same arguments 10x a day

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ViscountVampa@reddit

Please ban all AI related content, even that which is related to programming.

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ketralnis@reddit (OP)

Please say a lot more than this, we really need more details in order to take community feedback into account.

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ViscountVampa@reddit

Please say a lot more than this

No need.

we really need more details in order to take community feedback into account

You do not.

"ViscountVampa doesn't like it" is not going to get us anywhere.

Sure it would. If I was the moderator here this subreddit wouldn't have gotten off the rails in the first place.

You asked for feedback, my feedback is ban all AI related content, even that which is related to programming.

Ban all the middle management related content while you're at it, even that which is related to programming.

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ChemicalRascal@reddit

That's not feedback, though. They're demands, instructions.

It would be helpful to know why exactly you feel these topics should be verboten.

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ViscountVampa@reddit

You say please when making demands?

Stop being dramatic.

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ChemicalRascal@reddit

I didn't say please, but demands can absolutely contain the word please. Demands or instructions or requests, it's not actionable feedback.

By getting into the details of why you want a thing done, that is something we can begin to act on. That allows us to understand not what you want, but how you feel, why you do or don't use this place, et cetera.

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fagnerbrack@reddit

For the record, it feels to me there's a widespread divide in programming where in one side we have a lot of people that love coding and want to continue doing it, on another there's a huge wave of people accepting the commoditization of coding. I do believe that "programming" will permanently become more like engineering than the coding part (or maybe an intersect between building products/coding/reviewing/designing software?)

This is simply a symptom that's happening in the wild reflected here. There's a serious crisis in the programming world right now and not talking about it is IMHO putting our heads into the sand until we start losing our jobs which will be taken by those willing to move on.

It's sad but it's true. I wish I had control of it but I don't

What I'd suggest for the sub is to keep the "programming" topic as anything that makes a program do something, be it via prompts or direct code or reviews. Maybe require mandatory flairs like "coding" and "prompting" so people can decide which paradigm interests them?

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mthunter222@reddit

Unless it's about personally/manually composing sequences of instructions in a programming language for a computer to execute I do not want to read about it here. Any other activity/topic can, as far as I'm concerned, find a home in one of the many other fine subreddits related to that specific purview like r/programminglanguages, r/softwaredevelopment, r/softwarearchitecture, r/artificialintelligenc, r/machinelearning, &c.

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ViscountVampa@reddit

I still have an old account where I literally put ketralnis' account on block so that their submissions would be hidden and I could actually read content on r/programming that was about programming.

It's so bizarre that the person we're responding to was one of the worst contributors of content that had almost nothing to do with programming software.

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lelanthran@reddit

It's so bizarre that the person we're responding to was one of the worst contributors of content that had almost nothing to do with programming software.

I dunno; What post are you thinking of? In the decade or so I've been here /u/ketralnis and /u/fagnerbrack are the ones I remember the most as "people who post good programming content"

Who do you have in mind?

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ViscountVampa@reddit

As far as it goes, ketralnis doesn't seem to be spamming the subreddit constantly in the same way they used to be. I abandon accounts often and on recent accounts have not felt any need to add ketralnis to the block list.

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fagnerbrack@reddit

I stopped posting any submissions containing AI-related talk, doesn't matter the topic. If the policy does change there's a lot of programming-related AI content that would be very valuable such as techniques to code in such a way the code is repeatable for agents, the fundamentals of how an LLM works, models that are better for X, Y, Z, etc. All strictly programming/engineering focused of course.

But again, I stopped anything AI-related after some conversations with /u/ketralnis and quite a frustrated interchange with some mods, so I'm playing safe 🙏

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MasqueradeOfSilence@reddit

over-reliance on LLMs feels antithetical to programming. There is no emphasis on learning and knowledge with modern LLM usage/agentic coding, only shortcuts and degradation of skill. I say keep the ban.

And if it has to be lifted, stick to strict mathematical and compsci content regarding LLMs and research -- i.e. actual coding. not business, not startup ads, not replacement doomerism, that's all off-topic

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Draconicrose_@reddit

I've only been lurking for a while but I think the sub has been feeling pretty good, so I'd say keep it.

I do have one question though, does this also cover neural networks and other AI related stuff, or just the generative AI?

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GregBahm@reddit

Talking on r/Programming kind of feels like talking on snapchat. I can have plenty of conversations that are reasonable enough to me as a programmer, but all threads seem to get deleted later. Which doesn't make that much of a difference, except I guess it means all discussions have a low ceiling on their growth.

r/programming seems like it's taking the evolution of AI in programming pretty poorly. In my dreams, there would be some programming subreddit where AI was not allowed, and r/programming would remain about programming as it exists in reality (where everyone I work with, at the biggest tech company on earth, uses AI all day every day.)

But I get that reddit's r/programming is mostly dominated by programming students, and there's logically a big difference between "what programming is" and what programming students think programming "aught to be."

So I'd be delighted to leave for a programming subreddit that was less ideological and more practical. But I don't think such a subreddit exists yet. I get more productive discussions about explicitly anti-ai subreddits than explicitly pro-ai subreddits, even though they're both different kinds of tedious.

Probably the only way to thread this needle is 1.) Ban AI from r/programming, in order to 2.) foster a pragmatic programming forum. Over time, the pragmatic programming forum will grow to replace the original programming forum, the same way that many new subs have subsumed old subs.

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cdb_11@reddit

foster the growth of new more pragmatic programming subreddits. Over time, the pragmatic programming subreddits will grow to replace the original programming subreddits, the same way that many new subs have subsumed old subs.

Honestly, what is with you people trying to replace everything? Why can't you just be normal, and have a separate subreddit dedicated to discussing AI programming specifically? Then you can choose to read both, or only the one that you are more interested in.

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GregBahm@reddit

You seem to think you're arguing against me, but you are saying exactly what I am saying? r/programming changes to become a sub where AI is banned. Some new sub like "computerProgramming" functions the same as r/programming used to be. Everyone who prefers discussion of programming to stay the same, switches to the new sub. Simple as that.

I don't love this kind of tedious drama, but I don't know of a better way to avoid it. At one point, I was part of an animation community that banned discussion of computer animation. That animation community is not existent anymore. At another point, I was part of a gaming community that banned discussion of mobile games. That community doesn't exist anymore either. What can I do but keep moving?

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cdb_11@reddit

You want a new subreddit that mixes the topics of normal programming and AI programming together, and I am arguing for separating them.

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GregBahm@reddit

I get the logic of banning AI from r/programming. Lots of people hate AI.

I don't get the logic of opposing an alternative subreddit where the topic isn't banned. What stake would you have in the uncensored subreddit? Is there something specific to "the actual job of programming" that you feel is offensive, conceptually?

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cdb_11@reddit

No, the problem was that before the ban 30% of the posts here were about AI. I don't mind occasionally reading something interesting about it, but it was all the same old stuff over and over again. AI is clearly a big enough topic to warrant a separate space for it, where you can discuss it to death without annoying everyone else. Just like we have specialized subreddits for other programming related topics.

I don't get the logic of opposing an alternative subreddit where the topic isn't banned.

I mean, you can do whatever you want on other subreddits. I'm just saying that it doesn't make sense to me, because you can subscribe to multiple subreddits at once. If I want more posts about C++, I subscribe to r/cpp. If I want more posts about the text editor I like, I go to a subreddit about it. I don't need a subreddit that combines all of it together for me.

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GregBahm@reddit

Weird. If this programming subreddit banned the subject of C++, I guess i could just go to a C++ specific subreddit to talk about C++ specific topics. But I have no interest in approximating one sub out of two, tediously. The goal is to talk about programming. 99% of my daily life as a programmer programming involves AI. It's just what programming is in the year 2026.

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cdb_11@reddit

0% of my daily programming involves AI. And for more specific things that I do daily and want to read more about, I follow subreddits about it, like a normal person. There is nothing weird about it.

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GregBahm@reddit

I totally get that. Like I said, most of r/programming is likely programming students. My understanding is that a lot of schools ban students from using AI, which makes sense. I don't think there's going to be a way for one subreddit to satisfy the audience of people for "programming, as it actually is," and the audience of people for "programming, as it used to be." I'm literally conceding this subreddit to the many children who's daily programming involves 0% AI.

You're telling me you object even to this? As if no real programming subreddit should be created to replace this subreddit. If there's nothing weird about that, it's only because there's nothing weird about redditors being irrational.

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untetheredocelot@reddit

Dude go make it. Who’s stopping you?

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GregBahm@reddit

Well AI would first need to be banned on r/programming permanently. Last month, everyone talked about AI, and then later mods would come by and delete the discussion after it's over. Which was just kind of weird.

I only know about the "ban" because, if I go through my own comment history, some of the discussions are within threads that are now deleted (and at the time I had no idea why.)

If people can talk about AI on r/programming, an "uncensored programming" subreddit would never get any traction. It's kind of like if you had "pics" and "uncensored pics." Who would go to "uncensored pics?" "Pics" is not a censored sub.

I expect most r/programming users didn't know about the april ban. It certainly never came up in the comments of all the threads about AI.

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cdb_11@reddit

I'm not a student lol, this is my job.

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Actual-Giraffe-2260@reddit

The April no-AI trial is basically r/programming doing what every bartender does when the well gets cloudy: pour it out, see what actually tastes like something, then decide if you want that back. My money's on half the community realizing they'd rather read code that took seven minutes to write than code that took seven seconds and tastes like five other bars.

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Full-Spectral@reddit

Please keep it. Maybe even expand it. Like buy some masks and take down some LLM data centers. Not that I would ever suggest such a thing, of course...

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DustyAsh69@reddit

This was great.

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AntiDynamo@reddit

I think it’s good to remove any kind of opinion post about AI usage by devs (eg “AI will replace us all”, “AI makes people bad devs”)

Problem is, they have to be removed really fast because none of us have any self-control and people will respond to the posts if they see them. And if a post stays up for 6 hours or even a day before it’s removed then it almost may as well not be removed at all, because by that point everyone has said their piece already

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BaNyaaNyaa@reddit

Is there a plan to re-review this rule in the future?

I DO see the purpose of some discussion of LLM: how to use it effectively, how to deploy it, what it's good and bad at. In theory, I would like these discussions to be allowed. However, with the current hype, I'm worried that the sub will be spammed almost exclusively with that kind of content. And it seems like a lot of users feel like AI is being shoved down their throat (or other orifice) constantly.

But I think it'd be worth reconsidering that rule in the future once the hype dies down a bit.

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NuclearVII@reddit

There are a few differing opinions among us, but yes - if we do proceed with the hard ban, we'd like to revisit the issue periodically as the hype dies down and thr discussion related to LLMs becomes less toxic.

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dhakalster123@reddit

The ship metaphor could have worn out its welcome but somehow never does. Possibly because anyone who's ever been the new captain on a half-built codebase with a missing manual felt their cortisol spike on the first paragraph.

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Truenoiz@reddit

Allow the LLM stuff so the well here is poisoned. If we keep it pure, any good idea here will get capitalized and used before humans get the chance to make money with it.

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pm_plz_im_lonely@reddit

Funnily enough I think LLMs are and will always be bad at capturing or identifying what a 'good' or 'novel' idea is, as it cannot fit in any context.

So you still need a human for this task. And while the AI can aggregate ideas, if it can't discern novelty very well and muddies the data, viewing the data through an AI may actually be worse.

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EveryQuantityEver@reddit

I have to say, i have enjoyed the return to actual programming content. I would be interested to allow the mathematical techniques for machine learning, but I really would not like to see this into a sub about promoting LLMs

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wrosecrans@reddit

I say when i doubt definitely err on yhe side if banning the AI stuff. I am sick to death if it being spammed inti every forum I read, and every piece of software I use. My politeness for the topic got burned out ages ago.

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Kwantuum@reddit

Honestly I've been sick of every online space being 50% occupied by AI discussions, and I miss being able to read about technical things that aren't AI related so the change is welcome. Despite the trial, a ton of the posted content, despite not being about AI still talks about the impact of AI in whatever the topic is. I'm in favor of keeping this, this rule can be relaxed in a few years once the dust has settled and it's not literally half or more of all content ever posted.

And yes, the improved enforcement of existing rules has been a breath of fresh air!

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Truenoiz@reddit

A lot of this AI stuff is also asking questions to improve the training data, I've noticed it in electrical engineering subs as well. I'd be happy to contribute if the data is getting used to cure cancer or feed people, but it's really going straight to global inflation by whoever has the most datacenter...

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currentscurrents@reddit

Do you have any examples of these questions?

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Truenoiz@reddit

https://old.reddit.com/r/ElectricalEngineering/comments/1t2z9df/pinn_based_em_simulation/

https://old.reddit.com/r/PLC/comments/1t4kqp1/simple_costeffective_multisite_ignition_setup/

https://old.reddit.com/r/PLC/comments/1t0vd39/connect_twinact3_with_factory_io/

https://old.reddit.com/r/PLC/comments/1stnz7u/any_robotic_integrators_here/

https://old.reddit.com/r/PLC/comments/1sipllc/best_practices_for_implementing_and_managing/

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currentscurrents@reddit

These look like real people asking real questions, albeit some of them are pretty dumb. The amounts have legit post histories and the text does not look AI-generated (except maybe #5).

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Truenoiz@reddit

To me, these seem like questions AI-modelling techs are asking to improve model quality. Integration has been notoriously resistant to AI takeover, because one wrong bit can blow up a factory. I never saw these kinds of questions until the last year or two.

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Constant-Zebra-9752@reddit

I've seen similar in other subs that I've been on for years. Glad I'm not alone noticing this. The posts and accounts look genuine, but the frequency and tone of the posts just doesn't feel organic at all. Even if a human is writing the questions, it certainly does feel like the purpose is for training data.

With the money involved in these AI companies, it wouldn't be much of a leap to assume that someone is using bought Reddit accounts and human written questions to collect training data on here. It's not like aged Reddit accounts are expensive, and it's not like any of these AI companies are ethical.

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Your_Friendly_Nerd@reddit

Keep it, there's plenty of subs around that are solely for stuff about AI

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szy1840@reddit

I'd keep the ban by default and only make exceptions for posts that are obviously engineering work, not AI discourse. Stuff like deployment/debugging/benchmark writeups with real code is useful. If it's mostly prompting philosophy, startup positioning, or 'will this replace devs' energy, it just turns back into the same 800-comment loop.

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ThisIsMyCouchAccount@reddit

I am a programmer and I am required to use AI.

It would be great to see quality AI-related content as it pertains to being a working professional dev.

Do I need to see "Top Ten New Skills Every Tech Leader Needs"? No.

Would I like to see "How I used AI, Y, and Z to Automate Whatever"? Yes.

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dryroast@reddit

So because you're required to use AI... You want to essentially make sure it's imbued in everyone else's feed?

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ThisIsMyCouchAccount@reddit

Yes. Exactly. That was my entire point. To ruin everybody else's feed.

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Commercial_Plate_111@reddit

I didn't really like it

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thuiop1@reddit

I feel there are already enough venues to talk about AI in programming already, and thus am quite happy with r/programming being rid of it. I would be lenient enough to allow non-LLM ML methods if the write up is about integrating them in a broader software product.

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InsaneOstrich@reddit

I think you should keep the ban in place.

I'm not sure what the reason for including mathematical techniques in machine learning in the ban was; that kind of content doesn't seem inherently detrimental to the subreddit.

However the percentage of posts about LLMs that are harmful or totally useless for one reason or another is absurdly high. It was a breath of fresh air not having any of that around.

Maybe at some point that technology will mature and people can have productive conversations about good use cases for it, but that's clearly not the case today.

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felinista@reddit

I'll probably be the only one to row against the current but given that AI is here to stay, with the amount of AI noise out there, I would really benefit from quality articles on AI/LLM and meaningful discussion around them.

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SourceControlled@reddit

I liked the April ban and would like to see it continue.

Before the ban it was just too hard to sift through all the noise, I'd end up just closing reddit and not actually looking at any articles.

I use AI for my job every day, part of my job is building agents and guardrails around how they are used/what they are doing, but the info that I was seeing articles on wasn't even helpful or particularly interesting.

I don't come to this subreddit for info on AI, it's a tool I use but it's not really what I want to read about when I want to catch up on the latest or interesting things in programming.

I do need to be able to build and work in AI systems, but I also need to be able to keep the quality of the software up and keep up to date on best practices and news so I can guide my systems properly and keep up to date with the actual programming part of the industry.

In April this sub became readable and useful again for me.

TLDR: AI is important right now, but it's better if certain spaces don't have constant AI content. The separation has been helpful.

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dhakalster123@reddit

The April trial taught us something useful: the problem was never AI as a topic. It was AI as an excuse to post content that wouldn't survive basic scrutiny anywhere else.

The categories you listed actually split pretty cleanly into two buckets.

Worth keeping: transformer techniques for sequence prediction, production deployment architectures, how to secure an AI-generated codebase, RAG implementation patterns. These are engineering problems. They have right and wrong answers. Bad takes get corrected. The posts age like normal technical content.

Worth removing regardless of AI: "hey I just discovered vibe coding will AI replace programmers", the TED talk with one line of code, prompting best practices that amount to "be nice to the AI." These aren't programming content. They're dressed-up opinion pieces that happen to mention a compiler.

The honest test I'd suggest: could this post exist in five years? A post about transformer architecture for sequence prediction — yes, that's a real technique with lasting relevance. A post about whether Cursor changed someone's workflow — maybe, if it's specific and technical. A post about whether AI will replace programmers — it was stale the first time someone asked it and it gets worse every repost.

The "will AI replace programmers" content is especially interesting because it's not really about programming. It's about job anxiety dressed up in programming vocabulary. Removing it isn't censorship, it's just accurate categorisation.

Personally the April ban felt slightly too broad. Losing the production deployment and ML architecture content was collateral damage worth avoiding. But the ratio of signal to noise in AI programming content is genuinely terrible right now and the moderation overhead is real.

Whatever framework you land on, the subreddit is worth protecting. It's one of the few places left where you can still learn something technically specific from a post.

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lelanthran@reddit

Very good, even though my last submission for my own blog post was caught up in the dragnet.

Keep it AI free.

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DavidJCobb@reddit

The April trial made this subreddit feel more like it was worth visiting than it had felt in years. There was less slopaganda and dross, but it also felt like there was more good content; it felt like people were coming in to fill the void that post removals might've left.

Programming isn't only writing code; it requires engaging with and expressing pure substance and meaning. LLMs are by their fundamental nature incapable of that, and exist specifically to discourage you from trying to do that; the technology is viral meaninglessness and anti-intellectualism wearing a patchwork skinsuit of stolen expression. It's fundamentally the exact opposite of everything that programming as a craft is. I think that's why this sub had both less dross and more substance during the trial: a space intrinsically can't cater to the fundamental principles behind both LLMs and programming.

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kaeshiwaza@reddit

I understand that some of us like or need to discuss about AI but there should be an other place. Anyway even if we allow it again it will not be interesting because it will immediately start with conflicts. It will be better for everybody to keep this place free of AI and start a new place elsewhere (maybe it's already the case ?). Also for the moderator it'll be easier to manage than to have to decide if it's more or less AI.

So, for me, +1 to keep the ban forever ! (and put a link if there is an other place for this).

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illusionofsanity@reddit

"AI" is a pretty broad brush. Is it short hand specifically for statistical learning/machine learning or doesn't it include all the topics in Norvig?

I like the idea of limiting/banning posts on all the wondrous and banal applications of LLMs to organise and catalog my grandmother's texts.

What would be a shame is outright banning all "AI" type things. There are some obvious neat applications for planning, search, etc. in programming. Even for machine learning and reinforcement learning

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ketralnis@reddit (OP)

Right, we already know "this is hard to draw a line about". 2/3 of our internal mod discussions are just restating this. What we're asking for is how we should draw it.

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illusionofsanity@reddit

Fair enough. That might then look like scrutinising posts referencing to "AI" as opposed to concrete techniques.

So banning AI posts, but allowing something like "Applying Mamba as a method to learn time dependent dynamics on the mpe environment".

That could filter low effort posts while allowing interesting and relevant content to ti come through.

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Mirko_ddd@reddit

I noticed that some domain is banned (dev.to for example, or some medium publication) but this does not mathematically cuts off AI generated contents posted on personal blogs or whitelisted websites.

One thing I would suggest is to create programming languages labels to filter out contents I may like to read (for example java, Haskell, C and so on) because you don't know what you're about to read until you click the link (or a rule to specify the language in the title?).

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ketralnis@reddit (OP)

I've been meaning to get around to creating some proper flairs for a while. I know programming languages are an easy dimension to cut things in but I think they don't really capture what I care about most of the time. "This uses haskell for its examples" is quite different to "This is about tuning the Haskell GC" and I don't know that we can rely on submitters to get it right necessarily. But "a thinkpiece on ethics in programming" and "implementation details of undocumented 6502 opcodes" are definitely different articles and I would want to capture that.

Anyway, what do you think are some examples of how you'd use flair?

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PerkyPangolin@reddit

Please ban repeat offender domains that usually get downvoted, but for some reason never removed.

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ChemicalRascal@reddit

If you believe stuff breaks the rules, please report it. (If it doesn't get removed, that's a good sign that it doesn't actually break the rules. I have gone through way too many iterations of trying to reword the "blogspam" report reason to make it clear that it's not referring to "someone posted a link to their blog".)

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Morphon@reddit

What about something categorical? Flair for:

teaching/education, compilers, languages, frameworks/libraries, ethics/philosophy, new releases, etc...

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Mirko_ddd@reddit

Thanks for the url ban clarification.

Well, I usually do filter out contents using flairs, and I think that might be useful. I propose the language flair because the other day I published an article here, which was strictly referring to java and I would solve a specific thing that affects java, and most users stopped at the title and talked about anything but the problem (or how they would solve it) in java. A bit of context about the language would be useful at a thread level, and people would gladly ignore language specific things they don't care, rather than spamming and poisoning a thread that may be useful to other people.

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Tipaa@reddit

I liked the reduction in hype/vibespam, but I'm happy for it to be relaxed to permit writing about programming adjacent-to AI/LLMs. There is a lot of great engineering going into them (there is signal among the noise), so we just need to isolate the signal.

Things like writing (not vibe-coding) efficient CUDA or scaling parallelism across clusters are still interesting in-and-of-themselves, whether they are for HPC, AI training, K8s or massive Minecraft operations.

I want to know about how I can be a better programmer, and I still don't care that someone else believes this is obsolete.

e.g. things I'd be ok with:

How $project builds a CI/CD that involves AI, but the article focuses on the design of building and craft of programming
How $algorithm is faster through hardware-sympathetic design (e.g. why FlashAttention has smart cache use and tiling memory access)
Observations on how $project is being affected by broad industry trends, and how they are dealing with it
How $team is doing security in the face of industry changes
Novel approaches to new tooling that becomes available, and how it fits into a well-engineered team

Things I'd prefer to not have:

How $project CI/CD involves AI, without telling us why their CI/CD is interesting and how it was built
How $algorithm is faster, so use this flag when running $program (e.g. "guise turn on -fa 1 it stands for "faster ai" and 1 means 'on' ")
Observations on industry trends that fixates on tools instead of how a team of engineers achieves a goal
How "security is now just a SaaS API call in the CI/CD"
Adverts for the latest tools without any discussion in how they change programming or engineering

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OrixAY@reddit

Keep the ban please. 99% of the discussions about techniques/best practices using AI are ads in disguise/cargo cult programming anyways. The rest 1% I'm sure there are far more suitable subreddits for that kind of content.

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sasik520@reddit

No matter if you like it or not, AI became one of the core tool in programming. Banning it completely for sure helps on the paper (eg. less quality complains but also less content in general!), but doesn't sound like a solution.

It's like banning automatic gearbox or ev on cars sub. Some dislike it, but there are a thing and even a major trend.

I remember times people disregarded intellisense and said good programmers don't need it because they know libs and docs and intellisense makes programmers basically stupider. It didn't stop intellisense growing and becoming the basic everyday tool. Could you imagine banning intellisense topics today on this sub?

The issue is low-effort content. Not only ai-related, though ai is the major factor of it. We need a solution to deal with it. But by banning it, we are neglecting the (r)evolution that is happening and affecting us at a huge scale.

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Hacnar@reddit

It's better to miss a few good articles because they won't be posted here than to miss a lot more due to additional noise from AI content.

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ttlanhil@reddit

Personally, even if LLM discussion is allowed, I'd still block anything that claims LLMs are an AI (or "Claude admitted" or anything else that suggests the speaker doesn't understand what they're talking about)

AI as a research field has come up with a lot of interesting things, and other than LLMs I think most would be interesting to read about and are usually technical articles rather than marketing spam (which LLM oriented stuff is)
The first dot point about maths in machine learning - that's probably interesting (although it's more maths than programming) and not LLM, so as long as it's not too often that category might be fine with me; the rest of the examples are LLM specific and overdone, so less useful

But there's also the case to allow some exceptions - e.g. if Linus posts about what is and isn't allowed in the kernel that comes from LLMs (and more importantly the rules around it), should that be allowed?
That's a highly educated opinion and has a lot of technical importance based on how widespread linux is

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syklemil@reddit

I didn't catch the announcement of the April trial, but I do feel like there was less complaining over april than usual. I can't accurately tell whether that's due to increased moderation or that + the new rule, however.

As for the bullet point list, I think that's content plenty of us won't miss in /r/programming, as in

mathematical techniques in machine learning ("using transformer techniques for sequence prediction")

sounds like it could go in /r/informatics or /r/compsci or whatever, and plenty others can go in some prompting-oriented subreddit (though apparently not /r/prompting); some even to technology-specific subreddits, just like how there's stuff on /r/java and /r/neovim and whatever that doesn't quite interest all of /r/programming, some of it, especially the latter examples, sound like they should go on LinkedIn as future food for /r/LinkedInLunatics.

But given that /r/programming is sort of a big-tent that shares some content with all those more specialty subreddits, the increased moderation in general, and

I don't want to go banning every faddy thing that's briefly so popular as to be annoying but we also need to be careful with the content that we allow because it's what drives future submitters, so it can be self feeding. This topic also brings out the rabid fans and detractors alike, so it's easy to get lost in a vocal minority.

then I think probably relaxing the ban makes sense, as actual quality content on LLM topics should be manageable through normal voting.

Relaxing the rules would also give some data on whether it was the increased moderation or the increased moderation + new rules that had the effect. I mostly suspect it was the increased moderation that did it, but I fear I'm wrong about that.

All that said, if people are generally happy with how April went, then continuing in the same track should be an entirely safe bet.

And, personally, I'm fine with the rules as-is. There's no content I engaged with that I noticed got removed, or wondered why wasn't in /r/programming.

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prescorn@reddit

Not sure about banning the content entirely, but it’s really encouraging to see the mods engaging and trying to find a solution that curates quality content. Thanks

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michael0x2a@reddit

Personally, I'm a fan. I felt there was way too much LLM-related content prior to the ban. It was drowning out other topics and making the sub too one-note.

I guess if I had to draw a line, I would personally be ok with posts that are related to creating LLMs. For example, I'd be ok with posts about new mathematical techniques in machine learning, since those topics are usually fairly rigorous and so more likely to teach me something new about math or CS.

However, I'd be ok with banning posts about using LLMs or discussing/speculating about the implications of LLMs on the broader tech industry. I often find the former to usually be uninteresting from a technological POV: such posts often just boil down to covering yet another way of gluing together/configuring LLMs. The latter is incredibly repetitive. I'm not interested in some random person X rehashing the same old "are LLMs good/bad/revolutionary/overhyped" talking points.

So, I'd be ok continuing to ban the remaining bullet points on your example list.

To boil it down even more: I think LLMs as a technological construct can be interesting, so would be ok with posts that crack open the abstraction layer. But higher-level posts that treat them as black boxes/building blocks tend to be kind of boring/simplistic, at least as of now.

If this sort of distinction is too nuanced to cleanly enforce, I think it could also be reasonable to either:

Continue the current blanket ban on LLM-related posts, or
Allow them for only 1 day of the week. It would create a release valve for LLM enthusiasts while still preventing overrun. It could also maybe help improve the signal-to-noise ratio for LLM-related posts. Forcing them to compete over a short timeslot will hopefully mean there's less votes flowing to low-effort/low-novelty posts.

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lizardhistorian@reddit

So if my post were about CNN or vLLM or VLA that would be fine? CUDA optimization?
I understanding immediately banning people that make low-quality AI slop post.

But a programming forum banning anything to do with AI in 2026 is incompetent.

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Hands@reddit

This subreddit has been in rare form (good) for the last month, keep it up. AI assisted programming doesn't seem like it's going anywhere but any thread talking about it better be worth its salt. Given the insane volume of garbage content about everything AI related I think the aggressive approach to policing AI and AI adjacent content is working beautifully.

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CircumspectCapybara@reddit

So the nuance is that the only additional category of content that we banned in the April trial and are asking about here is programming content that is about AI

I think that's a no brainer. AI (in all its various forms) is one of the biggest features of the discipline of software engineering and programming in general in 2026. To exclude discussions about content that are directly relevant to the day-to-day realities of 99.99% of engineers in their programming would be a huge loss to the community.

Like it or not, the world has changed, the industry has changed, we as engineers have changed. People need to be able to talk about it and learn from each other.

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watabby@reddit

oh wow! I didn’t notice this was taking place. I definitely noticed how this place felt more like it did before and actual information and experiences were being shared.

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drekmonger@reddit

There have been some interesting AI-adjacent content on /r/programming that I saw here and nowhere else. Like the guy who built an inference engine for GPT-2 in SQL.

On the other hand, there was also a lot of low-quality reactionary blog spam prior to the ban as well. It is nice to have a feed with that crap in it.

I wish there was an easy way to keep the good stuff, but I'm not smart enough to invent that filter.

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CrackedP0t@reddit

Please keep banning anything AI-related, it's so nice to have one corner of the internet to escape from it

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Successful_Bowl2564@reddit

I loved it - saw much much better posts.

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Techman-@reddit

Will repeat the same thing I said in April: thank you for doing [the trial]. I believe that the quality of the subreddit has improved as a result.

Please keep the rule in place.

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CircumspectCapybara@reddit

So the nuance is that the only additional category of content that we banned in the April trial and are asking about here is programming content that is about AI

I think that's a no brainer. AI (in all its various forms) is one of the biggest features of the discipline of software engineering and programming in general these days. To exclude discussions on content that are directly relevant to the day-to-day realities of 99.99% of engineerings in their programming would be a huge loss to the community.

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_l33ter_@reddit

Me wondering:

How many stuff did you ban|del in terms of numbers. Also was it a constant number during the month, or are some days especially higher than other ones? (Same question but with time - But if that’s a lot for you, I’d appreciate it if you could just list the days :D)

But I agree with you. All the things you’ve listed: it’s just ‘wtf’!

What else I’d be curious about is how AI-generated content is handled. Let’s take an example: How do I create a ‘hello world’ in language XY

Then the AI of your choice spits out a whole text. (Which is fine for hello world, but anything more in-depth that hasn’t been tested by yourself is rubbish!)

Basically, when helping someone, you should EXPLICITLY state that you’ve tested it yourself on Date:xxxx – or at least “Script was quickly jotted down from memory --> Better read it through again”

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johnnybgooderer@reddit

I hate the no ai policy. Ai is coming whether we like it or not. It will help our careers to know how to use it. It’s helping me now. And I have been a relatively successful programmer for more than 15 years. Talking about it is important so we can all learn together and talk about workflows that we have found to work well and the tradeoffs. Shutting down conversation here is just burying our heads in the sand.

That said, I don’t want to see posts by ai. I don’t want to see vibe coded code. I am very happy to see code that a person used AI to make in a safe way that is still engineering.

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SnooCalculations4708@reddit

Not allowing AI conversations here feels like not allowing conversations about both wrenches and pipes at the same time in a plumbing sub. The reality is some of the most interesting programming problems today are about how to integrate LLMs into existing systems, and some of the most important conversations are about how, when and why to use AI in the development flow.

That said, maybe it's best for the sub, because the amount of AI nonsense on here was ridiculous, but in blocking everything, you're also weeding out some of the most relevant conversations of the day, and I wish that were not the case. The reality is I, and most people I know that program for a living are being asked to integrate existing systems with AI, and it's some of the most interesting and challenging work I've gotten to do in a long time, and exceptionally relevant to this sub.

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leprechaun1066@reddit

It's been so much better. tbh if people want LLM-related content they can just hop over to hackernews since that's what it's become the last couple of years.

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Biom4st3r@reddit

I really appreciate the blocking your doing. Personally, mathematical techniques and things about machine learning in general should be allowed; Its interesting to read. The rest of that list...tos is a major impediment to my feelings in that regard. Keep up the good work!

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dryroast@reddit

I feel that the mission statement really says it all in terms of the rule. I personally don't think that AI makes the best code because it's trained on code of all qualities and mostly beginner code as is the nature of publicly available code. And on a forum that's supposed to be about people enthusiastic for honing their craft in this field it feels antithetical to the point to automate it away with an LLM, you'll lose your edge.

I am a part of the Blender community as well and Andrew Price (the guy behind Blender Guru) said it best with "don't automate a skill you wish to keep". Programming is still valuable to know and I thought it was a breath of fresh air to have the LLM ban, and I would love to keep it that way.

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_Noreturn@reddit

Keep it I liked it

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Squalphin@reddit

I was really close to unsubscribing back then because of all those AI posts. Very annoying. Reddit has more than enough LLM related topics, so a subreddit about programming should stick to truly programming related content.

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1_800_UNICORN@reddit

It’s unfortunate that there’s a lot of interesting discussion to be had about AI, but the discourse around it on Reddit is all reactionary.

AI is going to reshape the economy but it’s not going to be all doom and gloom. Let’s not forget that COVID also massively reshaped the economy - humans and human systems are adaptable. And the “all AI is slop” people are burying their heads in the sand - AI is as good as the prompting and context you provide and the human guidance you give it.

Unfortunately Reddit seems to be incapable of having non-reactionary discussions about the topic, so my vote is to continue to ban at least the content about LLMs for a bit longer until people can behave themselves and talk about the topic like adults…

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cdb_11@reddit

It's not about "burying your head in the sand", I wouldn't particularly mind seeing an occasional post about it it's something actually new and/or interesting, but the volume of it was just way too much. If people really want to discuss it, I think a subreddit about it should be linked on the sidebar.

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TheBoringDev@reddit

Eh, I think that’s an unfair assessment. I don’t know if you saw this subreddit beforehand but AI posts were disproportionate even if you believe it’s going to reshape the field. Having a subreddit that’s actually primarily about professional technical discussions is hugely refreshing when every single other technical online space is being overwhelmed with “here’s how I structure my markdown”.

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GabRreL@reddit

The trial was a good improvement IMO

mathematical techniques in machine learning ("using transformer techniques for sequence prediction")

I wouldn't mind getting posts on the foundational parts of LLMs like techniques for training, quantization, inference, etc., as long as it's not just self-promotion in disguise

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Garethp@reddit

I think the subreddit felt a lot more relevant this last month. When it comes to the nuanced new content that would be banned, the only two categories I would actually want to see on this subreddit would be the mathematical learning techniques and the production model deployment/testing architectures. It probably comes under the first category, but I'd actually make a clear distinction between classification models and their usage versus large language generative models.

As for why I'd draw that line, after thinking about it I think it comes down to the amount of novel information (to me) and how pervasive the information is being spread. The first part, novel to the reader, is obviously subjective and different for everyone (someone might come in not having heard about best practices for prompting yet), but I'd argue that the second part feeds into the first. Banning mathematical techniques and the applications of classifier models in production is going to restrict the visibility of those actually informative techniques a lot more than banning how you can secure your application with LLMs. Classifier models used to detect whether a prompt into or the output of an LLM would still fall into the category of "please no" for me though.

I suppose, what it comes down to for me, is that we're already oversaturated with information about everything LLM and LLM-adjacent. Machine Learning is a good topic, as long as it's not the same rot I'm seeing everywhere else all the time from everyone.

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youngbull@reddit

Please keep it up.

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skiabay@reddit

I think some level of discussion is warranted. For better or more often than not worse, AI tools are becoming ubiquitous in the industry, and i don't think burying our heads in the sand is the right approach. Personally, what I don't want to see are posts trying to shill for some tool, or show off some vibe coded slop.

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