Cloudflare's AI psychosis

There was a time Cloudflare just made the internet better by staying hidden like Batman’s identity: protect & fight the bad people, for the sake of the global city of the Gotham… err I mean the internet. When I installed Cloudflare on my website for the first time 10 years ago - it saved me tons of megabytes, saved me money on bills and also the moment it sent me a monthly reporting on how my site was performing… that’s when I knew Cloudflare (CF) was AWESOME. Because Cloudflare was doing a few things well: it sat in front of your site, ate the attacks, cached the static stuff, did the DNS, and that’s it. No BS.Good infrastructure. Fast. Reliable. Boring in the best way. The new stuff. Not so good. More importantly this is my personal opinion on my personal blog, you can disagree, that’s ok with me! Fundamentally I work at a small AI startup, rely on CF and I am a not-totally-unhappy-but-also-not-totally-happy customer of theirs. CF is a big business, a big money making machine. Today they are bigger than ever and still route a ton of the daily web (something like 1 in 3 requests or so).Great job for the shareholders and whatnot, the safety and caching layer they sell is doing something right and pays the bills (stock is at an all time high as I write this). No matter how well the stock is doing the last few years CF turned itself into something a little more cringey and clique (but not as bad as others cough △). Today it doesn’t feel like a company ran by good engineers, it’s now PMs and vibecoders with what I call AI psychosis: dream it -> vibe it -> ship it.Lost touch with reality First of all tons of more outages than ever, remember that React useEffect fkup [0]? Complete insane that this would happen at an infra company that runs a third or so of the web. Outages are omnipresent but let’s talk about my biggest complaint: the DX. The developer experience feels like bolted on as an afterthought. But CF is an infra company, with badass engineers, shouldn’t the DX be top? Instead CF decided it also wanted to be a cloud platform for everyone, kids, dogs, and vibers. How did we get there?The AI product manager mindset.