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 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.

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.

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.