Saying "this tool is genuinely useful to me and it's baffling how many people refuse to acknowledge that could possible be true" is not a sign that someone is being paid to "shill for AI".

(If it is then damn, I've been leaving a ton of money on the table.)

Some days it seems like the most vulgar Marxist would be more rigorous about doing a who-benefits analysis before using that to dismiss an argument than the median HN commenter. Fly.io benefits from AI hype because... more slop code gets written and then run on their servers? tptacek would burn his HN cred for that? Really?

> Fly.io benefits from AI hype because... more slop code gets written and then run on their servers?

I don't know if that's what fly.io is going for here, but their competitors are explicitly leaning into that angle so it's not that implausible. Vercel is even vertically integrating the slop-to-prod pipeline with v0.

As far as I can see this only makes sense if they actually believe that AI will accelerate production code that people will want to pay to keep running. Maybe they're wrong about that, but it's got to be sincere, or the strategy would be incoherent.

There are a lot of people whom's brain warning signals shut off when they think they are onto some money making idea. They will spend vastly illogicall amounts to "keep it going" often for years before admiting it's not working.

Look at stock market courses for instance. They are endlessly prevalent, an eternally green scam. People spend thousands to lose even more money all the time. Sunk cost fallacy is very hard for a lot of people to overcome. Scammers count on it. There is literally millions to be made in these scams if you have zero moral fiber and zero shame.

We are in a golden age of such scams. Not my quote but one article I read said something like business students right now are putting Adam Neumann's picture on their dorm walls to aspire to be like him...

> Whats nuts is watching all these people shill for something that we all have used to mediocre results.

this sort of post is the start of next phase in the battle for mindshare

the tools are at the very best mediocre replacements for google, and the people with a vested interest in promoting them know this, so they switch to attacking critics of the approach

> Its kinda sad to watch what I thought was a good company shill for AI.

yeah, I was sad too, then I scrolled up and saw the author. double sadness.

If you really think that feel free to continue with business as usual. I just hope you're not at a stack ranking company, or you are politically savvy though, because otherwise you're going to be in for a real shock in the next few years as your peers build their AI skills, tooling matures and models improve. A skilled dev with a well tuned agentic workflow can already finish non-trivial 5k LoC projects in a day, complete with copious tests and documentation, just imagine when the ecosystem has matured and the majority of your coworkers are hip to the game.

>hip to the game.

Thats the crux.

copious tests - That don't work but no one cares.

documentation - That no one has or ever will read, and is hilariously inaccurate.

There is a lot of software pre AI that is churned out because some manager wanted exactly what they wanted but it had no purpose or need. I expect that to explode in the coming years for sure. I'm not afraid of AI, its merely ok, another tool is all.

It will allow companies to dig themselves very deep holes. Devs wise to the game will be able to charge astronomical fees to empty the pools filled with the AI sewage they have been filled with.