Cloudflare's AI Psychosis

orf

> 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. Bugs happen all the time. They roughly increase with scale, not decrease. There’s an argument to be made about better testing, but this specific bug seems like a perfect one to slip through: multiple services, hard to spot at code review, involves JS/frontend, invisible at low traffic (test/UT envs). So IMO it’s not completely insane. Is the implication that Cloudflare should have no bugs whatsoever?

spicyusername

The fact is that every major company is AI accelerating their development, and soon, it will just be every company. We're already past the point of getting our hackles raised when we suspect something is AI written. Everything is or soon will be AI written. So I don't think it's that useful to blame bad product design on AI. Bad product design is just bad product design. Bad writing is just bad writing. Bad graphic design is just bad graphic design. The industry needs to get over this hump of pretending we're not all going to adopt AI for every imaginable thing. The cat's out of the bag, for better or for worse.

decide1000

Great read. Exact pinpointing of my feelings about CF lately.

daishi55

I don’t understand the impulse to whine and complain about the aesthetics of a big company. > a little more cringey and clique Why on earth do I care if someone thinks Cloudflare is cringe? What is interesting about that? They are following the market like everyone else. > Too many ways to do the same thing, none of them great…They got D1 (SQLite serverless), Durable Objects with their own SQLite, KV, R2, Queues, and Hyperdrive to speed up external Postgres or MySQL. What does this have to do with AI psychosis? I thought that was the thesis of this article? As I said, it’s just directionless complaining.

jeresuikkila

I'm also curious about the question posted at the end: where did the infrastructure nerds go?

reisse

> There was a time Cloudflare just made the internet better There wasn't. Cloudflare is a cancer grown too big. And it was always positioned to become one, the middleman between users and the Internet. It is already painful to browse web sometimes using the non-"standard" tools (that is, not a Chrome with Google account signed in, not an EU/US residential IP). What if tomorrow Cloudflare checks will require attested and signed browser binaries?

hypfer

Why would they do anything else? They own a huge chunk of the internet now - with many, many companies having deeply integrated CF into their own stuff. Switching costs are so high, from a business standpoint, investing in technical excellence would be wasted money. They're just a corp like everyone else. Gravity also applies to them. __ Don't take this as "they're right to do so". Take this as "You should never have started integrating their products this deeply. This was inevitable and obvious." Using CF always was trading short-term wins for long-term losses. We're now entering said long-term.

alberth

What’s missed from the post is that Cloudflare for many years now has felt that they are a “Cloud 2.0” company. And AWS/GCP/etc are “Cloud 1.0”. They believe that AI Agent will fundamentally change the internet, and it’s hard to fault them for seeing it that way when their own stats shows that bot/agents account for the majority of Internet traffic. As such, going all in on AI fits into their thesis of being “Cloud 2.0”.

latchkey

on the bright side, this rant doesn't sound ai generated.

tosh

I think like with most large companies that still ship new stuff: it gets a bit more complex for customers to figure out what the good nuggets are and what to ignore for now same @ google, aws and so on (I usually rely on opinions of people i trust to find the 'javascript — the good parts' version of large offerings) the other extreme would be not to try and ship new stuff which is also risky difficult to find a balance and probably a good idea to over-index on momentum and new stuff while investing enough in hardening and improving the stuff that sticks

piterrro

The problem is, beside their size, they have not moat to compete in AI space. Their data centers are spread across the world in other companys DCs (btw do they own any DC actually from top to bottom?).

gedy

A good point made in the post (that's not really specific to CF) is the problem with multiplying features. It's interesting that most of the extremely-hot-on-AI companies and leaders I know are hyped about 100x product dev, etc and want to throw tons of new assorted features out. This is not a good thing! I've been at companies with lots of staffing and velocity (pre-AI), and it is a huge foot-gun to think pumping out features is automatically a good thing. Most paying customers do not want this from SaaS type companies. Smaller companies especially should calm down and do one thing well, and unfortunately AI dev does not encourage that.

tokioyoyo

It sounds like a blog post in support of a slowdown for product releases. But the reality is there are multiple companies trying to capture the attention of the same market. Maybe 2 years ago it would’ve been acceptable to release the product internally, slowly add features, dogfood it, then open to public a year later. But now someone else will release the same product within a month, get sticky customers, and most likely won’t switch. It’s much easier and faster to release features, so once anyone sees a competition gaining some attention, they just copy the same feature. Which, i think, is fair. It’s easy to blame the org, but the market is extremely competitive right now. Kind of race to the bottom, except the hardware parts, which have different constraints right now.

yodon

Cloudflare's UI is basically the web equivalent of the git CLI. Powerful, but the densest collection of UI anti-patterns known to man. Their "designers" obviously walked up hill both ways in the snow to school every day while being eaten by a walrus and feel anyone who doesn't enjoy a suitably opaque navigation scheme isn't worth acknowledging.

orliesaurus

Hey everyone, author here, I am very frustrated with the state of Cloudflare and I posted this blog the other day on my blog and here on HN (but generated no discussion), thanks for re-posting it, I am gonna start reading the comments and start replying

sarreph

I have to say: Yes, there is a lot of velocity from Cloudflare pushing out AI-adjacent features as of late. But also: What they've doing with Workers et al. has made them a platform for fully-fledged apps and deployments. I personally love the ecosystem and use it for all of my projects now. It's like the perfect blend of ease-of-use and DX of Heroku, and breadth of services of AWS / GCP. Well, maybe not quite AWS or GCP, but that's kind of the point -- they've created an opinionated system of "objects" that are all highly extensible to the point where in my opinion you can pretty much deploy anything you want on it. It took me a bit of time to learn the "Cloudflare way" of doing things, but once I started making on it I saw just how flexible (and low cost!) everything is.

aleda145

Hard disagree. Sure their docs are bad, and it's sometimes buggy. But to me cloudflare is actually innovating and trying to offer "new" infrastructure. Durable objects and workers are super cool. R2 has free egress, isn't it insane that they could pull that off? If what you want is a VM to run postgres then there are other offerings that would be much better. Not saying they aren't evil though, they probably are, but the infra stuff is cool.

themgt

I view a lot of this as downstream from sort of the IaaS version of the "DRM problem" in cryptography. In the DRM problem you want to sell someone a Blu-Ray with a movie they can play, but also not allow them to copy the movie. So they get the data but can't have the data. In the IaaS problem you want to sell someone a piece of server(s) in a datacenter they can play with, but also not allow them to just directly use the hardware (because then they could have open standards and portability). So the product teams are required to work backwards from the necessity of wrapping compute in a thing you can sell as a product. This also explains nonsense like "durable objects", which may have some purpose but become the weekly podcast fad after getting hyped by cloud providers trying to find new ways to sell compute without selling compute.

nzeid

This is definitely as opinionated as an opinion piece can go. Worth mentioning I don't use CF anywhere or care about it... but my employer does. I can really only remember one catastrophic outage. It involved some part of CF that had no redundancy, and the incident was followed by a pretty whiny blog about a data center. That's pretty much it. There were other minor outages but I'm not aware that it affected business. Despite the disclaimer I think the author should explain precisely how "AI product mindset" or whatever is actually translating to bad outcomes.