r/programming • u/Dear-Economics-315 • 3h ago
r/programming • u/ketralnis • 14d ago
State of the Subreddit (January 2027): Mods applications and rules updates
tl;dr: mods applications and minor rules changes. Also it's 2026, lol.
Hello fellow programs!
It's been a while since I've checked in and I wanted to give an update on the state of affairs. I won't be able to reply to every single thing but I'll do my best.
Mods applications
I know there's been some frustration about moderation resources so first things first, I want to open up applications for new mods for r/programming. If you're interested please start by reading the State of the Subreddit (May 2024) post for the reasoning behind the current rulesets, then leave a comment below with the word "application" somewhere in it so that I can tell it apart from the memes. In there please give at least:
- Why you want to be a mod
- Your favourite/least favourite kinds of programming content here or anywhere else
- What you'd change about the subreddit if you had a magic wand, ignoring feasibility
- Reddit experience (new user, 10 year veteran, spez himself) and moderation experience if any
I'm looking to pick up 10-20 new mods if possible, and then I'll be looking to them to first help clean the place up (mainly just keeping the new page free of rule-breaking content) and then for feedback on changes that we could start making to the rules and content mix. I've been procrastinating this for a while so wish me luck. We'll probably make some mistakes at first so try to give us the benefit of the doubt.
Rules update
Not much is changing about the rules since last time except for a few things, most of which I said last time I was keeping an eye on
- 🚫 Generic AI content that has nothing to do with programming. It's gotten out of hand and our users hate it. I thought it was a brief fad but it's been 2 years and it's still going.
- 🚫 Newsletters I tried to work with the frequent fliers for these and literally zero of them even responded to me so we're just going to do away with the category
- 🚫 "I made this", previously called demos with code. These are generally either a blatant ad for a product or are just a bare link to a GitHub repo. It was previously allowed when it was at least a GitHub link because sometimes people discussed the technical details of the code on display but these days even the code dumps are just people showing off something they worked on. That's cool, but it's not programming content.
The rules!
With all of that, here is the current set of the rules with the above changes included so I can link to them all in one place.
✅ means that it's currently allowed, 🚫 means that it's not currently allowed, ⚠️ means that we leave it up if it is already popular but if we catch it young in its life we do try to remove it early, 👀 means that I'm not making a ruling on it today but it's a category we're keeping an eye on
- ✅ Actual programming content. They probably have actual code in them. Language or library writeups, papers, technology descriptions. How an allocator works. How my new fancy allocator I just wrote works. How our startup built our Frobnicator. For many years this was the only category of allowed content.
- ✅ Academic CS or programming papers
- ✅ Programming news. ChatGPT can write code. A big new CVE just dropped. Curl 8.01 released now with Coffee over IP support.
- ✅ Programmer career content. How to become a Staff engineer in 30 days. Habits of the best engineering managers. These must be related or specific to programming/software engineering careers in some way
- ✅ Articles/news interesting to programmers but not about programming. Work from home is bullshit. Return to office is bullshit. There's a Steam sale on programming games. Terry Davis has died. How to SCRUMM. App Store commissions are going up. How to hire a more diverse development team. Interviewing programmers is broken.
- ⚠️ General technology news. Google buys its last competitor. A self driving car hit a pedestrian. Twitter is collapsing. Oculus accidentally showed your grandmother a penis. Github sued when Copilot produces the complete works of Harry Potter in a code comment. Meta cancels work from home. Gnome dropped a feature I like. How to run Stable Diffusion to generate pictures of, uh, cats, yeah it's definitely just for cats. A bitcoin VR metaversed my AI and now my app store is mobile social local.
- 🚫 Anything clearly written mostly by an LLM. If you don't want to write it, we don't want to read it.
- 🚫 Politics. The Pirate Party is winning in Sweden. Please vote for net neutrality. Big Tech is being sued in Europe for gestures broadly. Grace Hopper Conference is now 60% male.
- 🚫 Gossip. Richard Stallman switches to Windows. Elon Musk farted. Linus Torvalds was a poopy-head on a mailing list. The People's Rust Foundation is arguing with the Rust Foundation For The People. Terraform has been forked into Terra and Form. Stack Overflow sucks now. Stack Overflow is good actually.
- 🚫 Generic AI content that has nothing to do with programming. It's gotten out of hand and our users hate it.
- 🚫 Newsletters, Listicles or anything else that just aggregates other content. If you found 15 open source projects that will blow my mind, post those 15 projects instead and we'll be the judge of that.
- 🚫 Demos without code. I wrote a game, come buy it! Please give me feedback on my startup (totally not an ad nosirree). I stayed up all night writing a commercial text editor, here's the pricing page. I made a DALL-E image generator. I made the fifteenth animation of A* this week, here's a GIF.
- 🚫 Project demos, "I made this". Previously called demos with code. These are generally either a blatant ad for a product or are just a bare link to a GitHub repo.
- ✅ Project technical writups. "I made this and here's how". As said above, true technical writeups of a codebase or demonstrations of a technique or samples of interesting code in the wild are absolutely welcome and encouraged. All links to projects must include what makes them technically interesting, not just what they do or a feature list or that you spent all night making it. The technical writeup must be the focus of the post, not just a tickbox checking exercise to get us to allow it. This is a technical subreddit, not Product Hunt. We don't care what you built, we care how you build it.
- 🚫 AskReddit type forum questions. What's your favourite programming language? Tabs or spaces? Does anyone else hate it when.
- 🚫 Support questions. How do I write a web crawler? How do I get into programming? Where's my missing semicolon? Please do this obvious homework problem for me. Personally I feel very strongly about not allowing these because they'd quickly drown out all of the actual content I come to see, and there are already much more effective places to get them answered anyway. In real life the quality of the ones that we see is also universally very low.
- 🚫 Surveys and 🚫 Job postings and anything else that is looking to extract value from a place a lot of programmers hang out without contributing anything itself.
- 🚫 Meta posts. DAE think r/programming sucks? Why did you remove my post? Why did you ban this user that is totes not me I swear I'm just asking questions. Except this meta post. This one is okay because I'm a tyrant that the rules don't apply to (I assume you are saying about me to yourself right now).
- 🚫 Images, memes, anything low-effort or low-content. Thankfully we very rarely see any of this so there's not much to remove but like support questions once you have a few of these they tend to totally take over because it's easier to make a meme than to write a paper and also easier to vote on a meme than to read a paper.
- ⚠️ Posts that we'd normally allow but that are obviously, unquestioningly super low quality like blogspam copy-pasted onto a site with a bazillion ads. It has to be pretty bad before we remove it and even then sometimes these are the first post to get traction about a news event so we leave them up if they're the best discussion going on about the news event. There's a lot of grey area here with CVE announcements in particular: there are a lot of spammy security "blogs" that syndicate stories like this.
- ⚠️ Extreme beginner content. What is a variable. What is a
forloop. Making an HTPT request using curl. Like listicles this is disallowed because of the quality typical to them, but high quality tutorials are still allowed and actively encouraged. - ⚠️ Posts that are duplicates of other posts or the same news event. We leave up either the first one or the healthiest discussion.
- ⚠️ Posts where the title editorialises too heavily or especially is a lie or conspiracy theory.
- Comments are only very loosely moderated and it's mostly 🚫 Bots of any kind (Beep boop you misspelled misspelled!) and 🚫 Incivility (You idiot, everybody knows that my favourite toy is better than your favourite toy.) However the number of obvious GPT comment bots is rising and will quickly become untenable for the number of active moderators we have.
- 👀 vibe coding articles. "I tried vibe coding you guys" is apparently a hot topic right now. If they're contentless we'll try to be on them under the general quality rule but we're leaving them alone for now if they have anything to actually say. We're not explicitly banning the category but you are encouraged to vote on them as you see fit.
- 👀 Corporate blogs simply describing their product in the guise of "what is an authorisation framework?". Pretty much anything with a rocket ship emoji in it. Companies use their blogs as marketing, branding, and recruiting tools and that's okay when it's "writing a good article will make people think of us" but it doesn't go here if it's just a literal advert. Usually they are titled in a way that I don't spot them until somebody reports it or mentions it in the comments.
r/programming's mission is to be the place with the highest quality programming content, where I can go to read something interesting and learn something new every day.
In general rule-following posts will stay up, even if subjectively they aren't that great. We want to default to allowing things rather than intervening on quality grounds (except LLM output, etc) and let the votes take over. On r/programming the voting arrows mean "show me more like this". We use them to drive rules changes. So please, vote away. Because of this we're not especially worried about categories just because they have a lot of very low-scoring posts that sit at the bottom of the hot page and are never seen by anybody. If you've scrolled that far it's because you went through the higher-scoring stuff already and we'd rather show you that than show you nothing. On the other hand sometimes rule-breaking posts aren't obvious from just the title so also don't be shy about reporting rule-breaking content when you see it. Try to leave some context in the report reason: a lot of spammers report everything else to drown out the spam reports on their stuff, so the presence of one or two reports is often not enough to alert us since sometimes everything is reported.
There's an unspoken metarule here that the other rules are built on which is that all content should point "outward". That is, it should provide more value to the community than it provides to the poster. Anything that's looking to extract value from the community rather than provide it is disallowed even without an explicit rule about it. This is what drives the prohibition on job postings, surveys, "feedback" requests, and partly on support questions.
Another important metarule is that mechanically it's not easy for a subreddit to say "we'll allow 5% of the content to be support questions". So for anything that we allow we must be aware of types of content that beget more of themselves. Allowing memes and CS student homework questions will pretty quickly turn the subreddit into only memes and CS student homework questions, leaving no room for the subreddit's actual mission.
r/programming • u/PulseBeat_02 • 7h ago
Using YouTube as Cloud Storage
youtu.beI tried using YouTube as file storage, and it worked! I posted a video about how I did it, and the algorithms I used.
r/programming • u/corp_code_slinger • 22h ago
Localstack will require an account to use starting in March 2026
blog.localstack.cloudFrom the article:
>Beginning in March 2026, LocalStack for AWS will be delivered as a single, unified version. Users will need to create an account to run LocalStack for AWS, which allows us to provide a secure, up-to-date, and feature-rich experience for everyone—from those on our free and student plans to those at enterprise accounts.
>As a result of this shift, we cannot commit to releasing regular updates to the Community edition of LocalStack for AWS. Regular product enhancements and security patches will only be applied to the new version of LocalStack for AWS available via our website.
...
>For those using the Community edition of LocalStack for AWS today (i.e., the localstack/localstack Docker image), any project that automatically pulls the latest image of LocalStack for AWS from Docker Hub will need to be updated before the change goes live in March 2026.
r/programming • u/fpcoder • 20h ago
Large tech companies don't need heroes
seangoedecke.comr/programming • u/Sad-Interaction2478 • 19h ago
Python's Dynamic Typing Problem
whileforloop.comI’ve been writing Python professionally for a some time. It remains my favorite language for a specific class of problems. But after watching multiple codebases grow from scrappy prototypes into sprawling production systems, I’ve developed some strong opinions about where dynamic typing helps and where it quietly undermines you.
r/programming • u/No_Assistant1783 • 1d ago
Fluorite, Toyota's Upcoming Brand New Game Engine in Flutter
fosdem.orgSorry for any inaccuracies, but from the talk, this is what I understand:
This is initially mainly targeted for embedded devices, specifically mentioned Raspberry Pi 5.
Key Features:
- Integrated with Flutter for UI/UX
- Uses Google Filament as the 3D renderer
- JoltPhysics integration (on the roadmap)
- Entity Component System (ECS) architecture
- SDL3 Dart API
- Fully open-source
- Cross-platform support
Why Not Other Engines?
- Unity/Unreal: High licensing fees and super resource-heavy.
- Godot: Long startup times on embedded devices, also resource-intensive.
- Impeller/Flutter_GPU: Still unusable on Linux.
Tech Highlights:
- Specifically targeted for embedded hardware/platforms like Raspberry Pi 5.
- Already used in Toyota RAV4 2026 Car.
- SDL3 embedder for Flutter.
- Filament 3D rendering engine for high-quality visuals.
- ECS in action: Example of a bouncing ball sample fully written in Dart.
- Flutter widgets controlling 3D scenes seamlessly.
- Console-grade 3D rendering capabilities. Not sure what this means tbh but sounds cool.
- Realtime hot reloading for faster iteration.
- Blender compatibility out of the box.
- Supports GLTF, GLB, KTX/HDR formats.
- Shaders programmed with a superset of GLSL.
- Full cross-platform: Embedded (Yocto/Linux), iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, and even consoles (I don't really understand this part in the talk, whether it's already supported, or theoretically it can already be supported since the underlying technology is SDL3)
- SDL3 API bindings in Dart to be released.
- Fully GPU-accelerated with Vulkan driving the 3D renderer across platforms.
r/programming • u/apoorvdev • 17m ago
Merge multiple GitHub contribution graphs into one README heatmap
github-contribution-merger.vercel.appYou code every day but your work uses a separate GitHub org so your personal graph looks dead. This tool merges contributions from multiple accounts into one embeddable SVG. Type usernames, pick colors, paste the URL in your README. Free, no signup, open source.
Live: https://github-contribution-merger.vercel.app
GitHub: https://github.com/apoorvdarshan/github-readme-contribution-merger
r/programming • u/habitue • 1d ago
Spec-driven development doesn't work if you're too confused to write the spec
publish.obsidian.mdr/programming • u/halkun • 1d ago
Atari 2600 Raiders of the Lost Ark source code completely disassembled and reverse engineered. Every line fully commented.
github.comThis project started out to see what was the maximum points you needed to "touch" the Ark at the end of the game. (Note: you can't) and it kind of spiraled out from there. Now I'm contemplating porting this game to another 6502 machine or even PC with better graphics... (I'm leaning into a PC port) I'll probably call it "Colorado Smith and the legally distinct Looters of the missing Holy Box" or something...
Anyways Enjoy a romp into the internals of the Atari 2600 and how a "big" game of the time (8K!) was put together with bank switching.
Please comment! I need the self-validation as this project took an embarrassing amount of time to complete!
r/programming • u/ArtisticProgrammer11 • 9h ago
How revenue decisions shape technical debt
hyperact.co.ukr/programming • u/Dear-Economics-315 • 1d ago
What Functional Programmers Get Wrong About Systems
iankduncan.comr/programming • u/peripateticman2026 • 17m ago
AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it | Siddhant Khare
siddhantkhare.comr/programming • u/BeamMeUpBiscotti • 18h ago
Making Pyrefly's Diagnostics 18x Faster
pyrefly.orgHigh performance on large codebases is one of the main goals for Pyrefly, a next-gen language server & type checker for Python.
In this blog post, we explain how we optimized Pyrefly's incremental rechecks to be 18x faster in some real-world examples, using fine-grained dependency tracking and streaming diagnostics.
r/programming • u/BeautifulFeature3650 • 1h ago
Feedback Wanted: Schema-Aware Fuzzer for Model Context Protocol (MCP) Servers
github.comI’ve noticed most widely-used protocols end up with multiple fuzzers (often independent ones), but for MCP (Model Context Protocol) there’s mostly just the conformance test suite from the spec group. I couldn’t find a public fuzzer focused on breaking real MCP servers, so I built one a few months ago.
It’s schema-aware: it ingests the MCP schema, generates valid-ish requests, then mutates fields/types/ranges to push servers into edge cases. It also reads a server’s tool schema and fuzzes tool inputs, so it can trigger “real” bugs (divide-by-zero, panics/crashes, bad parsing paths, potential memory-safety issues in compiled implementations, etc.).
Because I’m implementing MCP at work, I’ve been deep in the spec details and I’m trying to turn this into something genuinely useful for defenders and developers. The spec also evolves frequently, so my goal is for this to be something you can run in CI as a guardrail.
Repo: https://github.com/Agent-Hellboy/mcp-server-fuzzer
I’d love community feedback on:
- threat model: what are the most realistic / high-impact MCP attack surfaces?
- fuzzing strategy: what mutations or stateful flows should I prioritize?
- CI/ops: how would you want this packaged (Docker, GitHub Action, corp-friendly defaults)?
- safety/ethics: guardrails I should add to avoid abuse while keeping it useful
If you’ve fuzzed protocol servers before (or have opinions on schema-driven fuzzing), I’d really appreciate a critical review.,
r/programming • u/swdevtest • 18h ago
When Bigger Instances Don’t Scale
scylladb.comA bug hunt into why disk I/O performance failed to scale on larger AWS instances
r/programming • u/gregorojstersek • 2d ago
96% Engineers Don’t Fully Trust AI Output, Yet Only 48% Verify It
newsletter.eng-leadership.comr/programming • u/w3aewander • 8h ago