Cloudflare's AI Psychosis

Post by orliesaurus » Sat, Aug 15, 2026, 3:37 PM UTC

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #54

I don't know where this person got the idea that a company "run by engineers" would result in good products. Engineers don't always care about the end result. I've seen engineers completely compromise the utility and experience of the product to make their own job easier or more fun. If it "sounds logical", they assume it's good and don't ask more questions about how it will impact users. Would you hire a mechanical…

Post by esseph » Sat, Aug 15, 2026, 3:45 PM UTC

orliesaurus wrote: post #47

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.

Post by esseph » Sat, Aug 15, 2026, 3:47 PM UTC

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #56

sssilver wrote: post #43

> 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.

What decentralized solution ever existed for preventing DDoS attacks while allowing a spike of traffic when, say, your blog post gets a highly upvoted HN submission? I am not really convinced this is a problem that can be solved without centralization. It'd be like trying to decentralize airports or communications cables.

Post by esseph » Sat, Aug 15, 2026, 3:52 PM UTC

gedy wrote: post #24

A 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 ou…

Post by cindyllm » Sat, Aug 15, 2026, 4:03 PM UTC

xpct wrote: post #14

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…

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.