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.)
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.
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.
> consider how difficult it would be to find a nice way of writing an article
Writing is often difficult. That's what makes good writing so distinctive and valuable. Just because something is hard doesn't mean it's not worth putting in the effort.
> "You are all fucking idiots" is sometimes a reasonable starting point.
It might be a good starting point in one's head (which, admittedly, it often is for me, but I then try to convert that into something more persuasive and less divisive). I think we'll just have to agree to disagree on that.
> I think we'll just have to agree to disagree on that.
In a saner timeline I'm right there with you. Certain types of policy and cognitive errors, though, remove the floor on communication decency--some popular conceptions are just so incredibly backwards that it's seemingly a disservice to treat them as anything worthy of more gentle correction.
> 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.
this was amazing post. i enjoyed reading it, it was relevant to some work stuff i was battling with. the linked articles at the end were amazing too. i had tonnes of respect for fly.io and yourself because of these posts. technically informative, clear, engaging. great stuff.
the llm post? complete polar opposite.
> I would like to take this moment to apologize to you, personally, for not giving a shit about "AGI". I wish I could tell you I've come to see the error of my ways, but I continue not to care about it.
thanks for the snark, and kinda proving my previous point about the tone of the article that was supposed to be a personal blog post and then ended up on a company bloghttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49052217
I'm not being snarky. I genuinely do not care about AGI.
It's weird to watch people write as if I'm trying to back away from that article or hedge or whatever. I expect to wrap my career up at some point and look at that post as one of the better and more valuable things I've ever written.
I can't judge how snarky I'm being overall. I'm writing like I would on any HN thread. What I was saying was: my lack of concern about AGI is not snark.
It's weird to me that anybody would call that out. Are you super worried about AGI?
okay, well, then this is me telling you that overall, the comment with the fake apology came across as really snarky.
>Are you super worried about AGI?
no. i typically agree with your takes on ai. i usually just happily ignore your tone and enjoy the substance of your comments but i thought this particular exchange from you was exceptionally odd so i commented on it.
I am paying attention to what you're saying but I think if you look at the context of this thread and take a beat you might sense, like I do, that the bar for charity is a bump or two lower than it normally is.
> this was amazing post. i enjoyed reading it, it was relevant to some work stuff i was battling with. the linked articles at the end were amazing too. i had tonnes of respect for fly.io and yourself because of these posts. technically informative, clear, engaging. great stuff.
i deliberately pointed out past praise and respect i had for your writing. i made an effort to go out of my way to provide an example of good stuff. as someone said in the andrew kelley black pill youtube comments -- people are a package. i too can be abrasive, dismissive, arrogant etc. i am a flawed human being too. so, in the spirit of not being a complete fucking dick i decided to point out something good you have written.
i'm highly critical of the article in question. i have the freedom and right to be critical of it, whether or not you think it's one of your best pieces of writing. and your general tone in this thread (and previous threads) has only solidified my view.
You gotta understand the context we're discussing this in, where a post from a year ago that raised a mob of anti-AI people got brought into a discussion about this, a post that is by itself a tricky needle to thread. That was an unpleasant and unproductive thing to do, but more important a cringe thing to do: there are apparently people still in their feelings about that post despite everything that happened in the year since to moot the debate.
You're of course free to have your own opinion! I'm just relating mine.
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.
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.
I think you are misunderstanding me, when I replied initially to the first comment to Simon, I was talking about my opinion on the general matter unrelated to your post's specifics, as in, I personally wouldn't debate AI anymore, not that I was speaking in relation to what you wrote.
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.