Comment by rileymichael
2 days ago
they lost a lot of aura among folks i know with the 'ai skeptics are nuts' article[1]. haven't read a blog post since.
2 days ago
they lost a lot of aura among folks i know with the 'ai skeptics are nuts' article[1]. haven't read a blog post since.
Good discussion on the HN thread about that article. To be honest, based on the latest models and agentic engineering, that blog post is definitely right. It's not 2023, 2024, or 2025 anymore, agents have gotten a lot better.
It's right in the point it brings up that modern LLMs are serious engineering and quite a bit capable at many tasks. It's not correct on the rest where Ptacek appears dismissive because 'he doesn't wanna hear' about copyright and other things, maybe we chalk it up to an upset guy at people he believes and maybe knows are wrong and ignore the rest of the spiel, but I won't.
I think the effect was less about it being correct or not, but instead more about if fly.io would treat humans as first class users compared to agents or not in the future.
The message is fine, but it was a weird choice to have it on fly.io instead of a personal blog
It's just marketing, going with the times of lots of vibe coders now suddenly wanting to put something on the Internet. I wouldn't read too much into it as a fundamental philosophy.
Yeah, I think that post from June 2025 has aged pretty well. The Coding Agent revolution hadn't really happened at that point (Claude Code was only ~4 months old) so the paraphrased message "this stuff is actually useful for programming, saying it's all just stochastic parrots misses the mark" was still non-obvious to a whole lot of people.
Honestly, the biggest problem with that article was the title. People read as far as "are nuts", got offended and refused to engage with the content of the piece.
This opening paragraph does a much better job of capturing the core argument:
> Some of the smartest people I know share a bone-deep belief that AI is a fad — the next iteration of NFT mania. I’ve been reluctant to push back on them, because, well, they’re smarter than me. But their arguments are unserious, and worth confronting. Extraordinarily talented people are doing work that LLMs already do better, out of spite.
The title was the point of the post. I have acquaintances who are still sore at me about it. But the problem wasn't that people disagreed with me about LLMs; the problem was that we were locked in an unproductive and static equilibrium of people talking past each other and hedging their way out of any direct, empirical confrontation over what was happening.
It's easy to forget how different early 2025 was to today. You would generally feel like you were in an inverse Emperor's New Clothes situation if you believed what your own eyes told you about how LLMs wrote code. That's not the case anymore; you hardly ever see people talking about (or, really, extrapolating wildly about) hallucination today.
(For a lot of reasons I think a lot about how that post was received in 2025 and what the world is like today. "Vindicated" doesn't capture the feeling.)
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> Honestly, the biggest problem with that article was the title.
Pretty sure the content of a company's blog post being overtly arrogant, abrasive, dismissive and generally dickish was also a problem.
> Meanwhile, software developers spot code fragments seemingly lifted from public repositories on Github and lose their shit. What about the licensing? If you’re a lawyer, I defer. But if you’re a software developer playing this card? Cut me a little slack as I ask you to shove this concern up your ass.
> Yeah, we get it. You don’t believe in IPR. Then shut the fuck up about IPR. Reap the whirlwind.
> but it’ll never be AGI -- I don’t give a shit.
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Indeed, it's not worth engaging with AI skeptics anymore today, it's just a waste of time. If they don't see the value then they probably never will, and that's not my problem.
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It's not 2023, 2024, or 2025, but LLMs still suck at programming. Just like every other time AI enthusiasts have claimed the latest and greatest is so much better than what came before.
> LLMs still suck at programming
They really don't. You're clearly the intended audience for https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/ !
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the way certain people at that company speak to others (e.g. that post) is why they will never count me as a customer. although im sure they dont care.
Wow. Opinions on LLMs aside, the CEO writing an article like that makes me think fly.io is a deeply unserious company.
The CEO didn't write that article. I did. I was going to run it on my personal blog, and he asked me to run it there. Be mad at him for the right reason.
I've been reading these comments and finally read the "Nuts" blog post. I guess I understand the butthurt, but I really appreciate this style of writing. Curt, forceful, to the point, fronting any internal conflict the reader may hold. This is clearly painful for conflicted readers. For the unconflicted, it is satisfying to merely agree or disagree.
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Maybe tone it down? personal attacks are not needed or wanted. Let's discuss AI, if not keep your comments for yourself
> they lost a lot of aura among folks i know with the 'ai skeptics are nuts' article
These people will be eating their hat soon if they aren't already.