By Thomas Ptacek (Fly.io) and The Nilenso Team • June 2025

I've been stewing on these two pieces about AI programming for a week now: Fly.io's combative defense and Nilenso's measured playbook. They're manifestos for competing philosophies about what it means to be a software developer in 2025.

The surface disagreement is about tone. Fly.io dismisses AI skeptics as working "out of spite," while Nilenso acknowledges legitimate concerns. But dig deeper and you find they're arguing about what it means to be a developer when the thing you've built your identity around starts dissolving.

The Woodworking Metaphor That Breaks Down

Fly.io's cutting analogy deserves scrutiny:

"Do you like fine Japanese woodworking? All hand tools and sashimono joinery? Me too. Do it on your own time."

The message is clear: stop treating enterprise software like your personal art project. We're here to ship features, not craft code cathedrals.

Fair enough. The counterpoint is: "What helps the human helps the AI." I.e. Good tests, clear documentation, consistent patterns, simple code structure, etc. It turns out the "craft" that actually matters is creating environments where both humans AND machines can work effectively. That's not fetishizing elegance. That's engineering.

As all analogies do, the woodworking metaphor falls apart if you nudge it. Nobody's paying a premium for hand-typed forEach loops. The master carpenter makes one table at a time; I can now generate entire systems before lunch. You can't refactor a chair (I don't think). Code is infinitely malleable, which makes the initial "craftsmanship" less important than we initially thought it was.

The real craft was never about beautiful code. It was about creating systems that work, that others can understand, and that can evolve over time. AI doesn't kill that craft. It just makes us admit what the craft was.

Kids These Days

There's this throwaway line in the Fly.io piece that stopped me cold:

"Kids today use asynchronous agents—wake up, assign 13 tasks, return to 13 PRs."

I tried this. Not thirteen, but five. By lunch, I'd reviewed more code than I'd written in the previous week.

Is this the future? Probably. Is it good? I honestly don't know.

The Nilenso folks say slow down, make small commits, and maintain standards. And of course they're right. However, something is intoxicating about the sheer velocity of "vibe coding". Like the difference between carefully composing an email and just firing off texts. Different kinds of communication for other needs.

The Thing Nobody Wants to Say

Both articles dance around the idea that being good at writing code and typing out elegant solutions is becoming less valuable. I spent years honing my skills in this area. And now? Now I watch an AI do it faster, often better, definitely without the ego.

Mental Models and Mediocre Code

The philosophical split is stark. Nilenso says we're here to "maintain large bodies of well-defined mental models achieving business needs." Inspirational! Probably true.

Fly.io says "mediocre code is often fine." Also true sometimes.

It isn't really about standards slipping. It's just recognizing that AI inverts the cost structure of software. When generation is cheap, perfecting every line becomes a waste of resources. The craft shifts from writing elegant code from scratch to designing systems that achieve business goals.

Hallucination Nation

Fly.io claims hallucination is "solved" through iterative agents that compile, test, and fix. Nilenso stays silent, emphasizing human review instead.

In reality, the severity of hallucinations depends on the context. Strongly-typed languages catch more errors. Sophisticated agents reduce impact. But for critical business logic, you still have to read every line. You're still responsible. The agent is just very fast fingers.

Where This Leaves Us

I don't have a clean ending here. Neither do these articles, really. Fly.io wants me to embrace the rocket fuel. Nilenso wants me to maintain my standards.

The hierarchy of software skills is inverting:

1. System design (irreplaceable and increasingly valuable)
2. Code quality judgment (valuable but increasingly automated)
3. Code writing ability (rapidly commoditizing)

Both articles agree that being excellent at writing code is becoming akin to being an excellent typist in the age of dictation. The new differentiator is orchestrating AI while maintaining judgment about what to build and whether it's built well.

The craft isn't dying. It's mutating. I'm not sure what it's becoming. But fighting it is like being a typist complaining about word processors.

The developers who thrive will be those who can manage AI agents like a conductor manages an orchestra, maintaining standards while embracing productivity gains that would have seemed impossible just two years ago.

Once you get over the existential crisis of watching a machine write better code than you, it's exciting. I spent yesterday designing systems instead of debugging semicolons.

And at least they can't write good blog posts yet...