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.

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‘

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.

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.

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

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. :)

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.