The use of LLMs is divisive in the world at large right now.
Both sides of the divide are well-represented by the Haskell community.
Some people find LLMs abhorrent and don’t want to have to look at anything LLM-adjacent.
Some people like to share and discuss LLM usage and LLM-driven projects.
I figure if we at least had a category for it, the former could get an automatic content warning, and the latter wouldn’t have every discussion turn into an argument over their choice to use an LLM.
I think the alternatives are worse. The status quo is exhausting. A separate forum is divisive and duplicates a lot of work.
That said, I don’t pretend to think this suggestion will go down easily. I hesitate to even post it, because I know I’ll catch flak for asking to “encourage the use of LLMs” or something. I’m fine with not encouraging it. But it’s happening, anyway. Neither side of the divide is going away.
I’m interesting in finding ways of keeping the community cohesive in spite of the divide. Carving out a designated space of this shared resource seems like one such way.
I don’t think this is a problem that can be solved with categories. The vibecoding tag on Lobsters exists and has several problems:
People use it to filter out content, so it gets over applied. If a submission is even vaguely adjacent to LLMs, it will get tagged as vibecoding.
On the flip side, if you are interested in LLM topics, the tag is ineffective because there’s no way to distinguish “explicitly about LLMs” from “tangentially related to LLMs”.
Due to a combination of the above, discussion about the vibecoding tag runs rampant. Threads frequently re-litigate the appropriateness of the tag, and meta submissions pop up frequently.
Of course the Haskell Discourse is not Lobsters, so things could play out differently. But I feel that the two groups (very roughly “LLMs are great, let’s use them for everything” and “I don’t want to see anything about LLMs at all”) are mutually incompatible. Trying to quarantine the former into a category won’t appease the latter.
I think it’d be neat if any post whose OP has LLM-generated content is tagged with that. I like that as a rule mostly because it’s pretty crisp and well-defined. And the descriptor is objective.
vs the Lobsters vibecoding tag which is not an actual description and is somewhat pejorative/hyperbolic.
We’re working on enabling tags and requiring LLM related posts to be tagged as such. People who do not want to see such posts can then ignore those tags. On the flip side, we will be more strict in moderating general criticism about the LLM use itself in posts with that tag, that kind of discussion should then be done in separate topics.
(I think tags are better than a category, because you might still want to put your posts into announcements/learn/links.)