AI post enhancement

Currently I'm getting lot complaining regarding my posts, like not using proper code formatting or spelling errors. Even a mail client currently offer a help in writing e-mail or AI assisted e-mail writing. Why do not we have such feature for the site? What I ask specifically as adding a check box in a post composing as - AI enhance my post. It should be currently optional and Profile - jdahlstrom - The Rust Programming Language Forum will also appreciate that.

1 Like

This is a hosted Discourse instance, so any feature like this would have to be developed on their end.

6 Likes

While AI may help with translations, I'd not trust it with code formatting. Also you don't need AI for that. There's a deterministic formatter called rustfmt that can do what most people here would expect. Adding this as an option to code blocks may be a useful feature.

However, since I believe your post in question was about code review, it'd not be suitable for such a case, since the formatter and/or AI may change the code such that it does no longer reflect the code to be reviewed, but a derivative of it.

6 Likes

Adding such a feature to the forum itself would add additional code complexity and UI clutter. A lot of people (myself included) do not want more LLM stuff being shoved in our faces. The technology is flawed and its marketing is a blatant dangerous lie.

Opinions aside, as @Schard mentioned you can use rustfmt for formatting help. A standard spell checker should suffice for spelling and should already exist in your browser (try right clicking). If you really want to use an LLM, just copy/paste to and from it.

8 Likes

Any innovation requires a certain effort. So it's a normal human reaction - let's do not do that. I completed my mission, I filed an innovation request from the forum members. Now, your turn to accept it or reject it. Any action is fine with me.

1 Like

I agree with this. Having AI on sites is a must in 2026. Claude would be good for this because it generates good code. :robot:

Instead of both requiring upstream development effort and cluttering the UI + slowing things down for everyone else, maybe you guys could just switch to a different tab and use one of 100 different AI tools to compose/edit your message? Or is that still too much work for you?

Also, who exactly gets to pay for the LLM hosting that the site now uses? I'm sure plenty would love for Rust foundation money to go to that instead of, oh I don't know, developing the language or something.

13 Likes

If one is using Claude to generate ones Rust why on Earth would one want it on this forum, you have already got it? I suggest using Warp terminal.

Dear God. The world is already saturated with AI slop everywhere. Can we keep this forum AI free? I want talk to communicate with real people, mistakes, warts and all. Not some cleaned up, corrected, polished, sanitised AI version of whatever it is they thought they were saying in the first place.

15 Likes

To be fair, upstream discourse does already offer more AI-powered features than what we have enabled on this site, and some usage of a smaller model (currently something called Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct) comes included with the hosting we already have. (I think the only enabled thing that we show is the LLM-powered extra search results; and our automatic spam detection uses it[1].)

IMHO it’s important not to be too in-your-face; some users may dislike overly-prominent new AI buttons; full-on “enhance my post” buttons, if not configured properly, might result in significantly worse posts – less thought-through, and uncomfortably more “LLM-style”-flavoured language.

Also, people who want help from an LLM might prefer more capable commercial models anyway. And setting up and testing a tasteful amount of “AI” for this forum is also extra work on the (very few) forum admins. Nonetheless, I’m somewhat curious about translation. Though I dislike the way that upstream Discourse – e.g. on meta.discourse.org – offers full multi-language experience with every post machine-translated unasked-for, into lots of other languages, the result of which is even shown to anonymous visitors based on their browser-configured primary language—that’s quite the shitty experience for users that can speak multiple languages. So that means more work once again, in coming up with a more acceptable alternative experience that’s strictly a net-beneficial thing. Also I wouldn’t mind something like an LLM-powered “can you find any typos?” button in the editor, which gives you feedback that you can manually adopt (i.e. it does not by itself modify your post), as long as such a button not overbearingly prominent.


  1. every automatically flagged case is of course manually reviewed though ↩︎

10 Likes

For people like me with a very limited knowledge of the English language it is a bit different. When I read bad or wrong grammar, I have the fear that I might remember it and later use it in the some wrong way. Typos in single words are less a problem for me, but I typically prefer posts with correct spelling. So I would actually like an AI flag "Caution: This post has bad text quality". But well, typically the text quality is quite good in this forum, so this is not an important point.

1 Like

As a non-native speaker with good English knowledge[1], I find my eyes glaze over when I read obviously LLM translated posts. This issue is actually worse over at IRLO, than here on URLO, when people make pre-RFCs with LLM help. Those tend to be far longer.

I choose to not engage at all with such posts, regardless of if it is slop or just LLM translation. Life is too short to waste my time on trying to wade through the word spewing.

AI features on here would also make me use the forum less (well, at least if it the results turn out as I fear), probably limited to just when I myself need to ask a question. That means less chances to help others and less chances to learn from reading other threads.


  1. I regularly think in English, or dream in English, or a mix of Swedish and English. I did a test for exchange student purposes and got the native-equivalent score in all categories. ↩︎

13 Likes

For what it's worth, r/rust moderators are currently soliciting community opinions on what the subreddit's AI policy should look like.

3 Likes

Surely that would be outside the scope of some particular topic's particular forum though, as opposed to being implemented in some browser-wide plugin or the like that you could choose to use.

1 Like

Yes, my idea was really bad, as I would not like to see most of my own postings flagged with "Caution: This post has bad text quality". I think every one should just put some effort into their post -- this includes the use of correct capitalization and punctuation. And correct code format Spelling is often covered already automatically in the text input box, as for this text entered in the Firefox browser -- obvious typos are marked with a read wiggled underline.

I think AI is overkill for spell checking and code formatting - it's better done by dedicated tools.
Don't know if discourse already has spell checking which isn't enabled here - seems quite simple to add a button. I was reminded about Doug McIlroy's paper about unix spell - interesting historical read; a compact efficient algorithm.

Where AI could help perhaps is searching - digging up an old thread based on a few vague clues - I think keyword search doesn't work very well here.