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Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work

blog.cloudflare.com

251–260 of 365 posts

Re: Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work

#251

It looks like this product uses pi-agent directly ( https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflare-os/blob/main/plans/... ). How come Cloudflare is not using their homegrown Agents SDK / Think / Flue harness for this? I am asking genuinely as I am evaluating a harness to build my agent platform.

Flue is actually also built on Pi. We are big Pi fans at Cloudflare.

Cloudflare OS uses pi-agent-core, but not pi-coding-agent. pi-agent-core, at least the way CFOS uses it right now, is more of an LLM API compatibility layer than a full harness. All the tools and things like compaction are implemented by CFOS itself.

The code was actually using ai-sdk (from Vercel) up until a few days ago, when I switched it over to pi-agent-core.

Why doesn't it use Think? Mostly because Think actually didn't exist yet when I started writing this, and the designs diverged in a way that made retrofitting hard. The CFOS harness does a few unusual things, like tracking the entire state of the filesystem as the conversation progresses using Yjs (a CRDT), so we can actually rewind the state to see what the agent saw at any particular point in time.

I would actually like to delegate more to Pi, because I don't think CFOS should be in the business of thinking about how to implement compaction or to optimize editor tools for each agent. But I'm not really sure if it'll be possible without giving up some cool things about the CFOS harness, so we'll see.

Re: Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work

#252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does workerd have full feature-parity with Workers, including stuff like Durable Objects?

It's the same code. The only thing it doesn't include is the global scheduling and orchestration, but you don't actually want that locally. (And honestly... that stuff is a bit of a beast.) Durable Objects are fully supported by workerd (and Cloudflare OS uses them extensively). There is, however, one catch currently: Durable Objects don't scale out well without the global scheduling. For running Cloudflare OS for on…

This is exciting! I've loved the idea of Durable Objects but I've disliked that there's no existing way to use them while scaling to multiple machines outside of Cloudflare.

Re: Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work

#253
The only way this is true secure is that this OS prevents ANYTHING from going out. It cannot make any arbitrary outgoing internet connection. It only has a downstream copy of your data that you are free to manipulate or search from within the system. The only output it has is the desktop GUI.

Other than that, it is not secure for an LLM to use because I could be given a document that talks about how to break the system and it would follow the instruction in there dutifully.

Re: Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work

#255
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's cool that it's open-source, but how much effort and scale would it take to run it on non cloud flare infra?

ffs there is literally no pleasing some people. "Hosting an open source project is too difficult! They should provide a free SaaS solution instead on their own cost but also no lock-in!!"

High switching costs is a form of lock-in "open source" or not.. This is something people with real experience making real decisions are well aware of..

Re: Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work

#257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the GitHub page: This is not a traditional computer operating system. We use the term "operating system" in two senses: - An operating system for the company to be productive with AI, in a way that is safe, so that the security team can sleep at night. - An operating system for AI workloads, analogous to the sense in which a traditional operating system manages compute workloads.

Wow this is really poor justification for its name, the folks at cloudflare really should not be overloading the term "Operating System" pointlessly like this.

They even put it in quotes, because they know what they did.

Maybe just take out the word "traditional" and be honest: "This is not an operating system. We're redefining the term because it is convenient for marketing."

Re: Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work

#258
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's cool that it's open-source, but how much effort and scale would it take to run it on non cloud flare infra?

ffs there is literally no pleasing some people. "Hosting an open source project is too difficult! They should provide a free SaaS solution instead on their own cost but also no lock-in!!"

I think it’s a legitimate question! Some companies operate at such a scale that if you tried to adopt their tools or services, it would be way too complex for the ROI.

Think Bazel or how K8s was for ~ever. For Google’s scale? Required. For a small team? A net-negative.

Re: Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work

#259
post #39
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sandstorm without self hosting has no interest though. (Edit: see below, where the creator states it _can_ be run locally) Buzz looks like a more reasonable direction than this does.

What do you mean? This is 100% open source and self-hostable! https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflare-os It runs on the open source Workers Runtime: https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd You can run it at home if you want. There's even a Home Assistant Gatekeeper.

I'd say better to not call it Cloudflare in that case

Re: Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work

#260
Interesting bit from the repo: there is an agent's plan (presumably unintentionally) checked in two days ago as part of a rewrite from the Vercel AI SDK to pi-agent-core (https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflare-os/blob/main/plans/...). That plan states "The project is in early alpha — minor behavioral regressions are acceptable and will be fixed as discovered.".
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