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?).
Cloudflare's AI Psychosis
21–30 of 106 posts
Re: Cloudflare's AI Psychosis
#22I 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…
i read the article as caring about the values, principles, and goals of the human beings driving it.
if you are looking exclusively at compiled bits and bytes and/or quarterly statements then I agree, human/societal judgment seems irrelevant.
Re: Cloudflare's AI Psychosis
#23The 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…
I've been fighting against the AI detractors for quite a while now but they refuse to see the light. The reason you're seeing AI everywhere is simply because LLM augmented workflows give you _obscene_ efficiency boosts. You need 500 pages of docs updated? Done. You need a thousand edge case tests written? Done. You need red team threat assessments plus adversarial attack writeups? Done. You need to semantically refactor X lines of code or hook up forty different API endpoints? Done. All practically done in an instant (well thirty or so minutes depending on the model). I've been following certain open source projects (won't name them due to brigading and for privacy reasons) that are 100% LLM generated. Meaning full self-healing infrastructure, automated tests, agents spawning off of agents... They're making _literally_ (and this is not hyperbole) 100 to 200k LoC changes _per week_ with a team of like one to two people. If you look at Bun, which at this point is essentially the poster child for a pure LLM developed project, and take a peep at their Github insights, you'll see this
"Excluding merges, 49 authors have pushed 243 commits to main and 6320 commits to all branches. On main, 1551 files have changed and there have been 165,176 additions and 35,130 deletions". This kind of code velocity is _literally impossible to recreate by humans alone_. Straight impossible. Which is why over time every company that wants to stay remotely competitive will have to switch to it.
Re: Cloudflare's AI Psychosis
#24A 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.
Re: Cloudflare's AI Psychosis
#25It 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.
Re: Cloudflare's AI Psychosis
#26I 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…
Because it affects people personally? They are using the stuff that's being neglected, and they could be using the stuff that is being half-assed if it's better.
And I don't believe it has to do with the market. I've worked at a company that was run by pms doing stupid shit. It was dressed up as what the business needed, but it was sheer incompetence. Better people in exactly the same situation would have produced better results by doing different stuff. It's just a culture, not market pressure.
Re: Cloudflare's AI Psychosis
#27Cloudflare'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.
Re: Cloudflare's AI Psychosis
#28> 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…
>> made the internet better
One of the measures of "making The Internet" could be looking at RFC contributions:
Re: Cloudflare's AI Psychosis
#29Hey 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
Re: Cloudflare's AI Psychosis
#30The 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?).
Side question: does anyone have a moat in the AI industry? AI vendors for sure do not. Hyperscalers don’t seem to have one. Datacenter companies are in an industry that is more difficult to enter but don’t have a moat per se. Same for manufacturers of HBM and other hardware. NVIDIA is maybe the only player with an actual moat thanks to CUDA & co