alt Hacker Newsr/programming bans all discussion of LLM programming
Comments
I 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.
Good 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.
Seems 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.
There 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.
There’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.
I 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.
Strange, that they didn't provide a link to an LLM subreddit or the right place, where to discuss LLMs ...
That sounds absolutely amazing. I will reconsider creating a new account and using Reddit again after walking away about a decade ago.
Good for them. Keep your projects human made by adopting a good policy. I use this one:
Maybe 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.
Wow 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.
This 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.
If 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/musicgr...
[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1rckopd/huntarr...
[3] https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1rs275q/psa_thi...
Not a surprise, reddit userers are clueless.
A question to people here: what’s a smallish community for tech with a slightly more serious level of discourse that this subreddit?
Clankers outta here! Wish there was an HN toggle to enable hiding all LLM programming submissions.
We 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.
I 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.
I 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.
As others have noticed in the thread, the timing is suspicious - could be April's fools.
/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.
The 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.
> 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.
Sweet, so the LLM can interact on topics not about LLM
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Not 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.
Reddit 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.
I 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.