[subarctic]

Saw this on my RSS feed and was surprised to see it hasn't been discussed yet on HN - fly.io used to be on the front page pretty regularly with some pretty big comment threads, but I had to go back over a year to find anything from them with more than a handful of comments. I guess they've become less relevant on here since they stopped allowing new users to host apps for free?

[tptacek]

What do you mean? We ran a big post about Litestream Writeable VFS just a couple months ago, and we've had several big posts over the last 12 months, including the Sprite launch. We got pretty busy, and there's a lot going on, and I am a bottleneck on big posts going up on the blog. We have a couple months of technical catching up to do. But it's not like we've vanished off HN.

[subarctic]

Ahh ok I just did a search on hn.algolia.com for fly.io and nothing came back with 10+ comments in the past year (until I posted this). But now I'm realizing they just don't include the url in the search, even though it says they do

[tptacek]

Right, just go to the front page and click on the linked domain on this story, it'll take you to all the previous submissions from our blog. It's been a light summer on blog posts, to be sure! But that's nothing new.

[Barbing]

Interesting, anyone know if there’s a way to replicate this on Algolia?

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=fly.io

  …/from?site=$domain

[simonw]

Try this:

https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search_by_date?query=fly.io&re...

[enraged_camel]

I think they became less relevant, at least amongst human users, when they hit a particularly rough patch with awful reliability issues a couple of years back. At least that's when my own social circle and loose constellation of developer acquaintances started saying "we should probably avoid Fly.io".

[nozzlegear]

My first introduction to the company was the "You're all nuts" blog post that's being litigated elsewhere in the comments. I'm not an AI skeptic (just an AGI/ASI skeptic) so I didn't feel like it was targeted at me, but the whole tone and standoffishness it gave left a very bad first impression.

[rileymichael]

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.

[1] https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/

[satvikpendem]

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.

[latency-guy2]

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.

[its-summertime]

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

[satvikpendem]

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.

[simonw]

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.

[tptacek]

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.)

[otterley]

> The title was the point of the post.

I still find it incredibly troubling. Not because the substance was wrong, but because a person of your caliber has stooped to the level of writing provocative headlines and language to attract attention. I strongly believe world-class technologists are supposed to be above that sort of thing. Leadership matters: not just thought leadership, but attitudinal leadership.

[tptacek]

The funniest thing about this post is that I was writing it, in my head, to a specific group of developers I've worked with, and who I know to be smart and more talented than me. What I should have seen coming was that when I described a group of people as the smartest developers I know, everybody who read it would think it was about them.

Live and learn.

[usef-]

fwiw, I don't think it was deliberately provocative for the goal of "attracting attention", it seemed to be his genuine belief.

I remember feeling similarly after seeing so many people denying what had already changed.

[dijksterhuis]

> 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.

[satvikpendem]

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.

[tptacek]

This is what I mean about the static equilibrium in 2025. That's what everyone was doing: just writing the other side off. That post of mine did a lot of things, but it did not do that.

[satvikpendem]

I never said your post did, and anyway I'm talking about today in 2026.

[bigstrat2003]

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.

[simonw]

> LLMs still suck at programming

They really don't. You're clearly the intended audience for https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/ !

[ViscountPenguin]

All of the contents of the article are basically correct (minus the agi bit), but god the tone is insufferable. I doubt it's done anything but dig sceptics further in tbh.

[john_strinlai]

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.

[wackget]

Wow. Opinions on LLMs aside, the CEO writing an article like that makes me think fly.io is a deeply unserious company.

[tptacek]

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.

[RickHull]

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.

[jagged-chisel]

Did they? I have stuff I launched in the last two months that’s still under the $5 limit and haven’t paid a thing.

[subarctic]

Oh ok i thought they charged a flat fee to use the platform now but maybe that was a temporary thing. My account is a few years old so i wouldn't know, i still have a few apps running on the smallest vm size and it's always under $5

[hedgehog]

It's probably getting less discussion because there's less user energy, the existing VM / database product has clearly not been a top focus for a while and in any case that business is becoming even more of a tough commodity for the reasons the post points out.

[dyauspitr]

No one talks about new software anymore. All the conversation is meta about LLMs that write software instead. This is a dead career, I’m just waiting for the LLMs to start writing code in binary.

[rdtsc]

> fly.io used to be on the front page pretty regularly with some pretty big comment threads

But that doesn't mean they are not doing stuff. It's just HN doing HN things. At the moment we're into "AI is eating the world alive" and other topics are in the background.