the same way they currently enforce authors own all copyright in their contributions, via the contributor agreement (OCA). in the real world, people aren’t going to intentionally sneak in LLM-authored code and potentially be legally liable.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> I don't select my engineering tools because they give me a bad feeling - I select them because they do the thing I want them to. If Bun starts having more bugs and feeling like worse software, I'll stop using it. But I will base that on data -- not a feeling I have.
being reactive is fine if you can tolerate issues. otherwise, you need to be proactive -- don't wait for the train to hit you before you move off the tracks
both options have their pros and cons. if you utilize some form of ratcheting[1], you can sneak it in without your team knowing.. but all of your PRs for the foreseeable future will have a ton of reformatting screwing with your git blame. if you do it all at once, someone will have to sort out conflicts, but you can utilize `blame.ignoreRevsFile`[2] so that your history remains useful
Even if you spread out reformatting over multiple commits in different PRs, you can still make use of blame.ignoreRevsFile as long as your pull request workflow doesn't enforce squash merges even when somebody took extra care to produce a nice commit history.
Yes, that is a good point. This is also why I personally would recommend to let a central person/team handle the reformatting rather than sneaking it into every PR (- see my sibling comment). That way you can be in charge of having a uniform style of commit messages to make the reformat commits easy to identify and create a well kept ignoreRevsFile. I think that provides the best of both worlds.
Unfortunately I find that code bases lacking auto formatting are often littered with non functional changes as developers temporarily instrument code, remove it, but leave whitespace changes behind.
In terms of tracking code changes, one really would have to rewrite the entire history with each commit reformatted.
i can't speak to gitea, but github and gitlab are explicitly mentioned as having a license in their policy:
> Please be aware that GitHub and GitLab are exceptions to this Policy because they are subject to explicit licensing arrangements that pre-date, and thus take precedence, over this Policy.
just noting that pinning within your own actions is not enough, you also need to ensure any composite actions do not use mutable references (for actions, docker images, etc.)
while external merge queues offer a ton more features, i wouldn't describe any of them as 'perfect' based on the simple fact the UX is bolted on. github continues to display their native UI components for merging, and users are forced to interact via arcane commands in comments or external CLIs/webpages. not ideal!
> This report was produced by me — Claude Opus 4.6 — analyzing my own session
logs [...] Please give me back my ability to think.
a bit ironic to utilize the tool that can't think to write up your report on said tool. that and this issue[1] demonstrate the extent folks become over reliant on LLMs. their review process let so many defects through that they now have to stop work and comb over everything they've shipped in the past 1.5 months! this is the future
The other day I accidentally `git reset --hard` my work from April the 1st (wrong terminal window).
Not a lot of code was erased this way, but among it was a type definition I had Claude concoct, which I understood in terms of what it was supposed to guarantee, but could not recreate for a good hour.
Really easy to fall into this trap, especially now that results from search engines are so disappointing comparatively.
Exactly. It's a force multiplier - sometimes the direction is wrong.
Same week I went into a deep rabbit hole with Claude and at no point did it try to steer me away from pursuing this direction, even though it was a dead end.
They seem to have some notions of pipelines and metrics though. It could be argued that the hard part was setting up the observability pipeline in the first place - Claude just gets the data. Though if Claude is failing in such a spectacular way that the report is claiming, yes it is pretty funny that the report is also written by Claude, since this seems to be ejecting reasoning back to gpt4o territories
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