Well, I never said that they seemed like a good idea to me. (It's personally hard to think of scenarios in which Venus-proof robots could be economical - unless the asteroids and other rocky planets/moons have all been tapped out, which is far-future enough that I don't care.) That's just what he seems to think.
I was wondering what people thought of this paper by Geoffrey Landis on colonising Venus. In it he suggests that cloud-top Venus is one of the most benign environments in the Solar System. Temperature and gravity are similar to Earth, there's some radiation shielding and useful resources, and aerostats filled only with breathable air would float at that height. I'm no expert so can't speak to how accurate it is, but it's certainly very thought-provoking for such a short paper.