> 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?
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”.
Likely to the AI labs and hyperscalers? Given the growth and level of expenditure I assume it’s a fun place where to work (assuming you’re ok contributing actively to the AI industry)
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
Well, let's not normalize bad product design. Worse, let's not normalize pushing out broken projects that never get maintained. It's noise and breaks trust. I'd say the maintenance part is especially bad now, I hold very little trust that people will maintain the projects they share.
Only part of the article I disagree with a bit. I'm willing to bet most infrastructure PM's at CF are technical people with engineering backgrounds.
I think what's more likely the culprit is the desperation to claim ground in the AI land grab. They (and many others) want to rush out an answer to all of the space's new challenges, out of fear of being beaten to the punch.
> 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?
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”.
I'm also curious about the question posted at the end: where did the infrastructure nerds go?
Likely to the AI labs and hyperscalers? Given the growth and level of expenditure I assume it’s a fun place where to work (assuming you’re ok contributing actively to the AI industry)
Great read. Exact pinpointing of my feelings about CF lately.
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.
on the bright side, this rant doesn't sound ai generated.
Accurate
> 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?
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.
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.
Well, let's not normalize bad product design. Worse, let's not normalize pushing out broken projects that never get maintained. It's noise and breaks trust. I'd say the maintenance part is especially bad now, I hold very little trust that people will maintain the projects they share.
I believe protest and criticism are corrective processes, and we shouldn’t give up.
It's not just the AI. The post mentions poor choices because of a product management mindset instead of engineers leading the PMs.
Only part of the article I disagree with a bit. I'm willing to bet most infrastructure PM's at CF are technical people with engineering backgrounds.
I think what's more likely the culprit is the desperation to claim ground in the AI land grab. They (and many others) want to rush out an answer to all of the space's new challenges, out of fear of being beaten to the punch.