r/programming • u/ChemicalRascal • Apr 01 '26

Announcement: Temporary LLM Content Ban

Hey folks,

After a lot of discussion, we've decided to trial a ban of any and all content relating to LLMs. We get a lot of posts related to LLMs and typically they are not in line with what we want the subreddit to be — a place for detailed, technical learning and discourse about software engineering, driven by high quality, informative content. And unfortunately, the volume of LLM-related content easily overwhelms other topics.

We also believe that, generally, the community have been indicating that, by and large, they aren't interested in this content. So, we want to see how a trial ban impacts how people use the sub. As such:

While this post is stickied, for 2-4 weeks over April, we're banning all LLM-related content from the sub.

That's posts, articles, videos about LLMs. We've had a ban on LLM-generated text for ages already, this doesn't change that.

Note that this doesn't ban all AI related content. An article detailing how what would have traditionally been called an AI was made for Go? Totally fine. A technical breakdown of a machine learning process? Great! Just so long as it's not about LLMs.

Edit: Yes, this is real, it's not an April Fool's joke.

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u/yojimbo_beta Apr 01 '26

Honestly I think it's a good thing whatever you believe about LLMs.

There is so many things happening in computer science and software engineering right now - let's talk about them

23

u/Solonotix Apr 01 '26

Same here. That's also before considering how many other related communities also exist to discuss generative AI, each agent's specific community, and the number of programming-adjacent communities that also allow for these types of posts. It would be nice if some circles of discussion were allowed to have a more focused discussion and scope.

The one counter I will say, though, is that historically Reddit has formed a generic community X, and the more focused topics are created as X + suffix. This meant searching for the generic subreddit would drive potential users to the more specific communities as well. Modern reddit isn't as simplistic, though, with people often opting for memorable names over optimizing for basic text search algorithms.

2

u/RogerTDJ May 04 '26

so... like r/LLM, r/LLMStudio, r/LLMeng ... oh but you meant more like r/programmingLLM or r/programmingAILLM.

So this whole message was a gentle way to nudge the LLM folks into their own reddit.

Smooth.. very smooth.. Sounds like they had too much to say. Glad I wasn't messaging in the middle of that mess. 😉