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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

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?

deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
jagged-chisel 3mo ago
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.
- subarctic 3mo ago
  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
hedgehog 3mo ago
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.
dyauspitr 3mo ago
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.
rileymichael 3mo ago
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/ https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/
- satvikpendem 3mo ago
  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.
  - simonw 3mo ago
    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.
    - dijksterhuis 3mo ago
      > 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.
enraged_camel 3mo ago
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".
- nozzlegear 3mo ago
  My first introduction to the company was the "You're all nuts" blog post that's being litigated elsewhere in the comments. I'm not an AI skeptic (just an AGI/ASI skeptic) so I didn't feel like it was targeted at me, but the whole tone and standoffishness it gave left a very bad first impression.
tptacek 3mo ago
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.
- subarctic 3mo ago
  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 3mo ago
    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.
    - Barbing 3mo ago
      Interesting, anyone know if there’s a way to replicate this on Algolia? https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=fly.io https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=fly.io …/from?site=$domain
      - simonw 3mo ago
        Try this: https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search_by_date?query=fly.io&restrictSearchableAttributes=url https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search_by_date?query=fly.io&re...
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
rdtsc 3mo ago
> 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.

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

jagged-chisel 3mo ago

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.

subarctic 3mo ago
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

hedgehog 3mo ago

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.

dyauspitr 3mo ago

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.

rileymichael 3mo ago

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/ https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/

satvikpendem 3mo ago
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.
- simonw 3mo ago
  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.
  - dijksterhuis 3mo ago
    > 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.

enraged_camel 3mo ago

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".

nozzlegear 3mo ago
My first introduction to the company was the "You're all nuts" blog post that's being litigated elsewhere in the comments. I'm not an AI skeptic (just an AGI/ASI skeptic) so I didn't feel like it was targeted at me, but the whole tone and standoffishness it gave left a very bad first impression.

tptacek 3mo ago

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.

subarctic 3mo ago
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 3mo ago
  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.
  - Barbing 3mo ago
    Interesting, anyone know if there’s a way to replicate this on Algolia? https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=fly.io https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=fly.io …/from?site=$domain
    - simonw 3mo ago
      Try this: https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search_by_date?query=fly.io&restrictSearchableAttributes=url https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search_by_date?query=fly.io&re...
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]

rdtsc 3mo ago

> 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.