| ▲ | subarctic 3 hours ago |
| 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? |
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| ▲ | tptacek an hour ago | parent | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | subarctic an hour ago | parent [-] | | 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 an hour ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | jagged-chisel 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | subarctic 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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 |
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| ▲ | rileymichael 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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/ |
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| ▲ | satvikpendem 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | its-summertime an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | 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 an hour ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | latency-guy2 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | bigstrat2003 23 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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 an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | 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 22 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > 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. |
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| ▲ | dijksterhuis an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > 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. | | |
| ▲ | tptacek an hour ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | dijksterhuis an hour ago | parent [-] | | do you remember writing this? https://fly.io/blog/carving-the-scheduler-out-of-our-orchest... 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 blog https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49052217 | | |
| ▲ | tptacek 43 minutes ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | john_strinlai 29 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | >I'm not being snarky "I would like to take this moment to apologize to you, personally, for not giving a shit about "AGI"." appears to be dripping with snark | |
| ▲ | 42 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | satvikpendem an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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 an hour ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | john_strinlai 37 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Wow. Opinions on LLMs aside, the CEO writing an article like that makes me think fly.io is a deeply unserious company. | | |
| ▲ | tptacek an hour ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | ragall an hour ago | parent [-] | | Well, you are a deeply unserious person. | | |
| ▲ | tptacek an hour ago | parent [-] | | I am, as I'm fond of pointing out, very comfortable with who does and doesn't take me seriously. |
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| ▲ | echelon an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > 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. | |
| ▲ | latency-guy2 an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | [flagged] | | |
| ▲ | sisve an hour ago | parent [-] | | Maybe tone it down? personal attacks are not needed or wanted. Let's discuss AI, if not keep your comments for yourself |
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| ▲ | hedgehog 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | rdtsc an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > 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. |
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| ▲ | 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| [deleted] |
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| ▲ | enraged_camel 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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". |
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| ▲ | dyauspitr 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| 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. |
