Cloudflare's AI psychosis

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1. Too many ways to do the same thing, none of them great1.1. Top it all up with some cherries for me will ya?

2. Workers Observability is still incomplete and it sucks<br>3. Product launches over infrastructure<br>4. Where did the infrastructure nerds go?

There was a time Cloudflare just made the internet better by staying hidden like Batman’s identity: protect & fight the bad people, for the sake of the global city of the Gotham… err I mean the internet.

When I installed Cloudflare on my website for the first time 10 years ago - it saved me tons of megabytes, saved me money on bills and also the moment it sent me a monthly reporting on how my site was performing… that’s when I knew Cloudflare (CF) was AWESOME.

Because Cloudflare was doing a few things well: it sat in front of your site, ate the attacks, cached the static stuff, did the DNS, and that’s it.

No BS.<br>Good infrastructure. Fast. Reliable. Boring in the best way.

The new stuff. Not so good.

More importantly this is my personal opinion on my personal blog, you can disagree, that’s ok with me!

Fundamentally I work at a small AI startup, rely on CF and I am a not-totally-unhappy-but-also-not-totally-happy customer of theirs.

CF is a big business, a big money making machine. Today they are bigger than ever and still route a ton of the daily web (something like 1 in 3 requests or so).<br>Great job for the shareholders and whatnot, the safety and caching layer they sell is doing something right and pays the bills (stock is at an all time high as I write this).

No matter how well the stock is doing the last few years CF turned itself into something a little more cringey and clique (but not as bad as others cough △).

Today it doesn’t feel like a company ran by good engineers, it’s now PMs and vibecoders with what I call AI psychosis: dream it -> vibe it -> ship it.<br>Lost touch with reality

First of all tons of more outages than ever, remember that React useEffect fkup [0]? Complete insane that this would happen at an infra company that runs a third or so of the web.

Outages are omnipresent but let’s talk about my biggest complaint: the DX.

The developer experience feels like bolted on as an afterthought.

But CF is an infra company, with badass engineers, shouldn’t the DX be top?

Instead CF decided it also wanted to be a cloud platform for everyone, kids, dogs, and vibers.

How did we get there?<br>The AI product manager mindset.

Ship slop, post it on X, get 200 like rinse and repeat.

Instead of focusing on expertise, reliability and simplicity…

This is how an INFRA company got product-managed into something closer to the problem it used to solve.

Too many ways to do the same thing, none of them great<br>When an infrastructure company gets crushed by a full product management org, you know what’s coming next: first features multiply. Naming turns into marketing (Hyperdrive? sounds cool right? ship it). All that seem to matter are some half-finished primitives, cousin-wife style.

Examples? Ok -> Let us look at data storage.

They got D1 (SQLite serverless), Durable Objects with their own SQLite, KV, R2, Queues, and Hyperdrive to speed up external Postgres or MySQL.

STILL no real first-class managed PostgreSQL that feels native. Keyword here is that it must feel native.

Hyperdrive is a smart connection pooler and cache for databases that live somewhere else.

Useful but an admission they never built the database most serious apps still want.

In the end you end up gluing three or four storage products together and hoping the docs for that combo aren’t six months out of date (IYKYK).

Ok maybe you’re gonna think: “YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT DUDE”.

Let’s take a look at the compute side.

Woops.

Compute is the same mess.

There’re Workers.<br>There are also Dynamic Workers, runtime-spawned isolates sold as a light alternative to containers for AI agents and untrusted code.

Then Sandboxes (on Containers).

Then full Containers…

and a bunch of “code mode” paths around it all, so agents can write and run stuff.<br>Each one has different isolation, startup time, pricing, and bindings.<br>None of them is just “the place you run code.”<br>Picking between them means reading multiple docs pages that contradict each other or lag the actual product.

Ok maybe you’re gonna say: “ DUDE WE NEED DIFFERENT LAYERS OF COMPUTE FOR DIFFERENT”. OK THEN - I MUST BE WRONG AGAIN.

Let’s look at the latest and greatest hype.<br>AI Agents.

Agents are even noisier.<br>Agents SDK.<br>Flue.<br>Project Think.<br>Cloudflare OS (they just open-sourced their internal agent workspace).

And the observability gets bolted on later (more on this below this section).

Every new announcement adds another harness or framework instead of finishing the one they already have.<br>Classic product manager move: add more surface area, maximize incoherence till the point developer experience feels...