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Cloudflare's AI Psychosis

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Re: Cloudflare's AI Psychosis

#41

Post by thecatapps »

I remember being so excited about Cloudflare's releases that I'd check their blog every couple of weeks for what new thing they were cooking up. This was before I actually had to use them to serve production clients.

When it came time to launch (2023?), the initial setup was using DNS/Cache, Workers, Workers KV, R2, D1, Durable Objects, Access, and Queues.

My first hint was that the Typescript library to access their API was simply just wrong. API requests through the library would fail, complaining about missing fields or invalid types, even though the types said my construction was correct, and I received dismissive replies when raising it in their Discord.

Then there were the D1 issues with random requests failing.

Then there were the Durable Objects issues with syncing clients in our collaborative editor.

Then there were the KV and (by extension) Access outages.

Eventually it made sense to switch it all over to AWS. Today, I trust Cloudflare for DNS, Cache, DDoS protection, and not much else.

The "AI psychosis" that may or may not have infected Cloudflare and caused this reminds me of Github's, except Cloudflare has a much much bigger moat.

Re: Cloudflare's AI Psychosis

#42

Post by vrganj »

rfgplk wrote: post #23
spicyusername wrote: post #4

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…

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 refac…

Who will read your 500 pages of AI docs? Or check your thousand edge case tests? Who will check the agent spawned off an agent? (That part reads like satire, honestly)

The reason people are AI detractors isn't because they don't believe you can spit out massive amounts of slop. It's because they question the value of it and whether it was worth the immense cost to our planet, ecosystem and society.

Re: Cloudflare's AI Psychosis

#43

Post by sssilver »

> There was a time Cloudflare just made the internet better

This is the kind of naive thinking that enabled what's going on today. Sadly, the decentralized Internet is now destroyed and will never exist again.

Re: Cloudflare's AI Psychosis

#44

Post by tosh »

tosh wrote: post #20

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 bala…

I also noticed the ui/ux of cloudflare got way better in the last weeks.

That's a good sign.

Usually ui/ux in large companies gets worse not better!

Re: Cloudflare's AI Psychosis

#45

Post by vb-8448 »

> Too many ways to do the same thing, none of them great

They want to eat at the AI table, given that they are not producing models or GPUs and not building datacentres, they try with the product. But we are still in the early stage so it's not clear what will work and what not, so they have to try as much as possible.

Re: Cloudflare's AI Psychosis

#46

Post by piterrro »

dgellow wrote: post #30
piterrro wrote: post #21

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?).

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

Companies specialized in building DCs and AI labs specialized in niche models?

Re: Cloudflare's AI Psychosis

#47

Post by orliesaurus »

tokioyoyo wrote: post #25

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…

Hi, I wrote the post, I think blaming the org for releasing things that aren't engineered/created with "love" (including docs, examples, long-term planning and a roadmap of improvement that will follow-on), and suitable for production, without labeling them as beta, is in fact detrimental to the status of a company's image.

Re: Cloudflare's AI Psychosis

#48

Post by nzeid »

gexla wrote: post #40
nzeid wrote: post #37

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…

Just skimmed the article, but the CF your employer used was probably around a lot longer than AI? There's parts of it that can bring everything down. Then there's parts of it that will bring down just what your team(s) put in a load of hard work to build on top of it.

The blog implies that CF's core business is suffering because of added investment in what the author describes as AI. See their useEffect bug as an example.

EDIT: To be clear, my employer still uses CF and I don't see any evidence that it's gotten worse.

Re: Cloudflare's AI Psychosis

#49

Post by evil_buzzard »

rfgplk wrote: post #23
spicyusername wrote: post #4

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…

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 refac…

Code velocity doesn't matter if you're shipping garbage. Shit fired from a cannon is still shit, even it's kind of cool that you built a shit-cannon.

The reason that "AI-detractors won't see the light" is that some people care about the quality of their work, AND ACTUALLY LIKE SOLVING PROBLEMS.

just because something makes a lot of money doesn't mean it's worth doing; there's this particular brainworm infecting AI enthusiasts that currently profitable == valuable. Tiktok is a profitable company, that doesn't mean it provides a service that is inherently valuable to humanity.

Re: Cloudflare's AI Psychosis

#50

Post by hasyimibhar »

> Examples? Ok -> Let us look at data storage.

> They got D1 (SQLite serverless), Durable Objects with their own SQLite, KV, R2, Queues, and Hyperdrive to speed up external Postgres or MySQL.

Maybe it's just me, but I don't see this as confusing:

- D1 is SQLite on cloud, their go-to relational database

- Durable object is the cousin of durable execution (via actor model instead of saga)

- KV is for caching like Redis (sub-ms read latency)

- R2 is S3, R2 SQL is Iceberg + Athena (for OLAP queries)

- Queue is SQS

- Hyperdrive is bridge to allow CF worker to use native Postgres/MySQL driver (since v8 isolate cannot maintain persistent connection)

I've built some stuff on top of CF, and the data ecosystem is actually useful.

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