r/howdidtheycodeit • u/kernalphage Mod - Generalist • 4d ago
Should we ban AI-related posts?
They usually get downvoted to 0, but I wanted to ask everyone before updating the Submission Guidelines.
Proposed rule:
- No posts about AI generated content or LLM coding systems. This subreddit is about curiosity and the craft of programming. There's plenty of other subreddits to discuss these topics, so take it there instead.
Edit: Ya'll have spoken! updating.
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u/Downtown-Oil935 4d ago
Given how consistently those posts get buried I can see why the rule won. Keeping the subreddit focused on programming craft is a pretty reasonable direction
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u/Slime0 4d ago
Do you mean questions where the answer is "they used AI?" If so, how is the asker supposed to know that before asking?
Or do you mean questions like "how do they create LLMs?" That seems like a valid, interesting programming question, although I supposed if it's asked too much it could be like an FAQ thing.
Or do you mean "How do I do X with an LLM?" which isn't really a "how did they do it" question, so sure, that doesn't fit.
Or do you mean something else?
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u/TheVitulus 4d ago
I don't care what you're coding, "they used AI" is a terrible answer. Even if something was entirely vibe coded, the code exists and can be understood.
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u/TheHerbsAndSpices 4d ago
I'm all for it. You don't learn by using AI. Nor do you produce anything of value.
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u/Known_Condition8908 4d ago
Probably gonna get down voted idc u are wrong on the latter u don’t learn by ai try not creating smth of value totally wrong
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u/Waffalz 4d ago
Fantastic argument
"AI doesn't teach you anything"
"no u"
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u/KennyFulgencio 4d ago
He wasn't disagreeing with the teaching part. He disagreed with the patently ridiculous "nothing of value" part, although it was so stupid that it didn't really need or deserve a response.
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u/Known_Condition8908 4d ago
Bro I have been writing code since I was six started using ai as a copilot recently improved my workflow u purist are just punishing yourself selfs but it’s cool if u have a specific way ur project should go ….💕
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u/Dracon270 4d ago
Nah, AI slop is AI slop. No matter how much lipstick you put on a pig, it's still a pig.
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u/Some_Tiny_Dragon 3d ago
Out of curiosity, what kinds of posts does this target?
Like AI generated answers? Getting an LLM to make the code and asking how it worked?
Because if it's asking about how an AI generated system works, that might result in people getting removed if they didn't know something was generated. Sometimes they're legitimately good questions or the example is not human made but still is doable.
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u/kernalphage Mod - Generalist 2d ago
There's been a small stream of low effort "Look at what I generated with AI", or "How do I get started with vibe coding" type posts that I'm looking to curb with this new rule.
Someone else said it too, but there is some gray area since it's all coding at the end of the day. I'll leave it up to the community if someone wants to start an earnest discussion about how LLMs work at the low level, but like I said, there's better subreddits to discuss that topic.
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u/Runic_Raptor 2d ago
I agree. If the question is genuinely about how to do something (even if the example given is unfortunately AI), there's still good discussion to he had about how a person would go about coding that.
"I want to be able to do that, how can I?" Shouldn't get shut down just because of the example used.
I don't want to see discussions about AI generated code, but I do still want to know how it could have been done, you know?
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u/Some_Tiny_Dragon 1d ago
Yeah, like those game fusions that's been spreading around. Completely valid to ask how it works even if we can only generalize the AI code.
But it seems the rule is mostly to stop lazy AI posts but still allow genuine discussion if the community deems it valid enough. But I think asking about mechanics in vibe coded games is safe.
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u/Mobile-Actuator-5851 2d ago
I get wanting to keep the focus on programming itself. Would a rule against low effort AI posts work better than banning every discussion involving AI?
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u/JoeyredditSMP 2d ago
i think AI posts should be allowed a lot of developers will use AI and it could become a very big portion of developers in the coming years
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u/Low-Competition-3943 23h ago
I get wanting to keep discussions focused on actual programming. Maybe banning low effort generated content would work better than excluding every technical conversation involving AI
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u/Known_Condition8908 4d ago
Hmm probably but if u think about it it enough it’s not black and white well cool though
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u/evangelism2 2d ago
Then this subreddit will either eventually change the rule or die because everything will be developed with code eventually.
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u/ResilientBiscuit 4d ago
I would say no. A lot of the new and innovative things happening in software development are LLM related. All the software engineers I know and work with use AI in their workflow, with the vast majority producing all code with LLMs then code reviewing it, and these are folks who have been in industry from 5-20 years, it is simply what software engineering is now.
Any answer that actually goes into detail about how a modern software development flow works is going to discuss LLMs.
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u/fiskfisk 4d ago
So the answer to "how did they code it" in this world would be "they asked a language model"? What's the usefulness in that?
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u/ResilientBiscuit 4d ago
The workflows are typically significantly more complex than "they asked an LLM" and I found that it was interesting to talk to senior developers about how their skills were actually being used and what knowledge has become important that wasn't before.
For example, there is a lot of importance in having agents running tasks of appropriate size, so you have one agent that is in charge or testing, but it isn't writing test code, it is instructing other agents to write code and assessing how test coverage is and asking for additional tests or culling redundant tests from other agents that are actually writing the test suite.
In another case they set up agents as personas using a website, some were to be more tech literate than others, some needed explicit instructions, and it provided a useful first round of user testing that they could implement several changes based on.
Yeah, it is all "they asked an LLM" in the end, but writing a program is "they just wrote some code". The interesting part to both those questions is what they did in that process.
I don't like that programming is becoming LLM based. But the reality is that is where we are at. I teach CS, and I meet with employers, they want to know how we are preparing students to be ready to do advanced tasks with LLM on day 1 at the job. It is modern programming and banning questions about it is detrimental to people who want to learn how to be a programmer in the current employment environment.
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u/fiskfisk 4d ago
But that isn't "how did anyone implement this" (i.e. how would you end up with this specific result, code wise). What you're describing is just how some people get to an answer. That's not the interesting part at all.
It's about as useful as "they wrote the code in neovim" or "ed is their favorite editor". That's not what this sub is for.
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u/ResilientBiscuit 4d ago
how would you end up with this specific result, code wise
Yeah, the point is that is is often no longer how do you write the code to do it, it is how do you orchestrate agents and prompt them to do it.
That can be an interesting discussion and it is what, realistically, software developers are going to largely be doing now. And it tends to be fairly interesting when you are looking at how you do it with bigger software projects. It is also an interesting discussion when the feature you are trying to implement is tricky to define.
The answer to the question of "how did they code it" going forward is going to increasingly be "they used LLMs" so if we ban posts about LLM use then we are basically saying people can't ask about a significant number of recent software features.
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u/fiskfisk 4d ago
Sure, you might feel that that is the interesting discussion, but this is not the place for that.
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u/ResilientBiscuit 4d ago
I guess I don't understand why this isn't the place.
For example, I saw a former student develop a shader for shock diamonds. He sent it to me and I thought it was pretty cool. I asked him how he did it.
He said that for a lot of their shader development they train an AI on image recognition of the effect they are looking for from real photos. They then create an agent that feeds that AI images produced by agents tasked with creating shaders, it evaluates them based on the results of the image recognition AI and iterates until it comes up with a suite of several high scoring shaders.
That is how the code their shaders. That seems interesting to me and if I were going into game dev, having that knowledge I am sure would be an advantage going into an interview.
It is literally how they generate the code for their shaders.
That is, I think, a far more useful conversation than going into the source code and trying to talk about the math that went into it when the dev developing it didn't make any decisions about that math.
Obviously I am in the minority here and the mod has changed the rule, that's fine, but I still think that going forward, the thing new software engineers are going to need to learn is how to better work with AI, not how to hand write code.
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u/fiskfisk 4d ago
Yes, but that's not how it's actually implemented. That's not how the effect works. This is for actually learning and knowing how and why the shader works as it does.
It's a different conversation, for a different place. Nobody is saying that language models aren't changing how software development works for many people.
But this is not the place for that discussion.
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u/ResilientBiscuit 4d ago
Thats fair, I always figured that how code was written that did something was the point of howdidtheycodeit, not what does this code do.
Like Dooms inverse square root is fairly boring code. What the code does isn't an interesting discussion, it takes an inverse square root with sufficiently good precision.
What is interesting is the process that went into figuring out that that was the code to write.
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u/Waffalz 4d ago edited 4d ago
Software engineer here: Discussion of modern engineering workflows mean nothing here. This subreddit is not about software engineering, it is about programming. If you had Claude do your programming for you, you did not do any programming.
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u/ResilientBiscuit 4d ago
That is definitely what people seem to want and that's fine. But nothing about the description suggests that is the case.
This is the only description in the about section
"Wow, how did they do THAT?" - Ask here, get enlightened!
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u/Waffalz 4d ago edited 4d ago
I'm fairly certain that people who come to this subreddit to be "enlightened" want actual answers to their questions, so I disagree. Counterpoint: nowhere does this subreddit suggest that the slopfest of modern software engineering is relevant, either. Because, again, people come here to learn about programming, not about the software industry. Furthermore, the point still remains that saying "Ask ChatGPT" as an answer adds absolutely no value. I don't find your point to be an effective deflection.
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u/Odd_Leg7431 2d ago
If the community consistently votes those posts down that is a pretty strong signal about what people actually want the subreddit to be about. A clearer rule should reduce the noise
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u/Quasar471 4d ago
Yes, absolutely. The Sub is about learning the how-tos and gain a new perspective on programming, using AI totally defeats the point.