Rationale for filtering LLM usage links as off-topic

14 points by facundoolano

Hi, I've been following recent moderation changes and the discussion around them. I understand that the vibecoding tag was conflating multiple meanings and uses, and how moving to the building-LLM-tooling makes it more precise for that subset of the discussion. I also see how people may be tired of the LLM discussion and want to completely filter out anything LLM related.

What I don't quite understand and I'm not sure if it was clearly explained is why stories about "(not) using LLMs" are now considered completely off-topic in this site. There have been plenty of useful discussions around practices and figuring out how to adjust for professional programming in the presence of LLMs over the last few months, and the "flavor" of those discussions is very different from that found in other communities. Also, they seem to still be reasonably encompassed by the current "topicality" guidelines ("Will this improve the reader's next program", etc).

Considering they could still be filtered by anyone not wanting to see anything LLM-related, what is the rationale for not having something like llm-usage as a tag and keep those discussions on the site?

ubernostrum

A lot of stories about LLM use boil down to either:

  1. "I told my LLM to do a thing, here's the thing", or
  2. "Here's the particular set of Markdown files I used or am using with my LLM"

Stories of type (1) offer nothing useful to the reader, because you could literally replace "LLM" with "inexplicable magic black box" and not changing anything else. OK, so if I also have an inexplicable magic black box I could ask mine to do that. What did I learn about programming or computing from finding that out?

Stories of type (2) similarly offer nothing useful to the reader, because within days, perhaps hours, perhaps even by the time you finish reading the article, the LLM community will have moved on to a completely different set of Markdown files.

So what, precisely, is it that we're supposed to get out of an endless stream of stories about this?

orib

There's no shortage of places where the topics you want to talk about are discussed. There's a clear shortage of places that don't drown out discussion with them.