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r/programming bans all discussion of LLM programming

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Re: r/programming bans all discussion of LLM programming

#81

Post by duskdozer »

btheunissen wrote: post #53
jyrkesh wrote: post #44

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 un…

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.

AI video and art is going to be increasingly used in advertising, news/reporting, games, etc. Therefore, you aren't allowed to hate it or even complain about it. Right?

Re: r/programming bans all discussion of LLM programming

#82

Post by minimaxir »

sph wrote: post #59
feverzsj wrote: post #4

HN should also limit all these self-promoting AI posts.

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.

As someone who wrote recently wrote the latter post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47183527), the more nuanced approach that "AI has good and bad things" is a more real-world reflective approach than an absolute "AI is good" or "AI is bad", and at the least it's more conductive for civil discussion.

Re: r/programming bans all discussion of LLM programming

#83

Post by redox99 »

yoz-y wrote: post #61

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.

> 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.

Re: r/programming bans all discussion of LLM programming

#84

Post by petterroea »

balgg wrote: post #76
jyrkesh wrote: post #44

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 un…

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.

Yeah I totally get the rule. I use LLMs when developing. In fact, I've been out of Claude tokens for the week since Wednesday, but I use Claude specifically for the boring, simple stuff I don't really want to do, but that Claude can. I'm simply not interested in discussing anything LLMs are able to do, it's not interesting.

It makes sense that a programming subreddit first and foremost discusses programming (the skill). We can go complain about Claude somewhere else if we want to.

Re: r/programming bans all discussion of LLM programming

#85

Post by petterroea »

petterroea wrote: post #84
balgg wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah I totally get the rule. I use LLMs when developing. In fact, I've been out of Claude tokens for the week since Wednesday, but I use Claude specifically for the boring, simple stuff I don't really want to do, but that Claude can. I'm simply not interested in discussing anything LLMs are able to do, it's not interesting. It makes sense that a programming subreddit first and foremost discusses programming (the skil…

Following up, anecdotally, people I talk to who are excited about LLM development usually either care more about product development, or don't have programming skill enough to see how bad the software is. Nothing wrong with either, but it can get tiresome.

Re: r/programming bans all discussion of LLM programming

#86

Post by petercooper »

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.

Re: r/programming bans all discussion of LLM programming

#87

Post by NietTim »

tovej wrote: post #62
jyrkesh wrote: post #44

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 un…

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.…

> I have seen vibecoded intern prototypes that took half a day to vet and dismiss because they were completely useless.

They weren't useless, they proved if the direction that the prototype was exploring was worthwhile. I've personally made many completely shit code prototypes in the years before we had LLM's, of course they weren't magically production ready, that's not the point of a prototype.

Re: r/programming bans all discussion of LLM programming

#88

Post by altmanaltman »

tovej wrote: post #62
jyrkesh wrote: post #44

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 un…

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.…

> I have yet to run into any serious project in the wild that is using LLMs for development.

How about Claude Code? 100% of it was vibe-coded according to its creator.[1] Google and Microsoft also claim a lot of their internal code is AI-generated now. [2] [3]

Naturally, none of the big tech companies will just release a pure vibe-coded project due to structural reasons, but you also _seriously_ can't claim that serious projects don't use LLMs as well these days. Maybe in your limited experience, it isn't true, but that doesn't generalize to what's actually happening.

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/Anthropic/comments/1pzi9hm/claude_c...

2. https://fortune.com/2024/10/30/googles-code-ai-sundar-pichai...

3. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/29/satya-nadella-says-as-much-a...

Re: r/programming bans all discussion of LLM programming

#90

Post by xnorswap »

viccis wrote: post #66
simianwords wrote: post #27

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.

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/ev…

One of most magical things about HN is that heavy comments are punished as a negative signal, not rewarded as a positive one.
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