Is code on or off topic?

Question

There seems to be a disconnect on the 'Tour' page about what is and isn't on topic here. Quoting directly from the about text (emphasis mine):

Artificial Intelligence Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for people interested in AI theory, mathematics, research, discovery, design, development, practice, embedded uses, cognition, policy, and impact. It's built and run by you as part of the Stack Exchange network of Q&A sites. With your help, we're working together to build a library of detailed answers to every question about artificial intelligence.

But then further down the page it has a "Don't ask about" section that includes:

Programming of artificial intelligence or machine learning

If I hadn't read further down the page to the dont ask about section, I would think that programming and code is on topic here. Mathematics, design and development could easily be misinterpreted as: I'm designing an AI to fit this data set, but I'm getting poor results using keras how can I devlope this model to be better?

(This isn't a complaint, just trying to help the site)

Answer 1

This issue has been discussed several times in the past. AFAIK, initially, this site wasn't meant to accept machine learning, statistics and programming questions (because that's already covered by other sites), but machine learning questions have been asked on this site for a long time and, given that they are considered part of AI, they are certainly considered on-topic now. However, not all implementation- or programming-related questions are on-topic here. I've proposed a new description for the on-topic page, which also attempts to explain which programming questions can be on-topic here, even though this is still a grey area, honestly. See What should the on-topic page look like?. My proposal has now become the new on-topic page. I suggest you carefully read and follow it.