11–20 of 106 posts
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?
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.
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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.
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”.
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 d…
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 d…
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 d…
It's not just the AI. The post mentions poor choices because of a product management mindset instead of engineers leading the PMs.
I think what's more likely the culprit is the desperation to claim ground. They (and many others) want to rush out an answer to all of AI's new challenges out of fear of being beaten to the punch.
It usually leads to a complex, almost incoherent product suite.
I'm also curious about the question posted at the end: where did the infrastructure nerds go?
> 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…
If it's painful, that's not because of cloudflare. You can get past turnstile challenges using tor browser in a VM. You still might be blocked because of policies set by site owners, but that can hardly be blamed on cloudflare.
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