My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts

Source: fly.io Date: 2025-06-09 URL: https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/

Summary

Essay by Ptacek arguing that AI skepticism among talented developers is misplaced and increasingly untenable. The case: modern LLM coding (agentic, with compilation + test feedback loops) is categorically different from early ChatGPT code-pasting. Code comprehension objections miss that developers review LLM output like any other code. Hallucination objections miss that compilers and tests close the loop. The craftsmanship objection misreads what professional software is for.

Implications

Agentic engineering adoption / competition with Vercel/Render. Ptacek is one of fly.io’s most credible technical voices, and this essay’s publication matters as a signal that fly.io is explicitly siding with the “this is real and transformative” camp. The essay is targeted at the developer population fly.io wants on their platform — technically sophisticated, skeptical, not early adopters — and is a soft recruitment play for the agentic workload market. The displacement acknowledgment (“LLMs may displace developers”) paired with “adapt rather than resist” framing is the professional consensus that’s forming. Watch whether fly.io follows this with product features that specifically target the converted skeptic’s workflow.