Thread

Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work

641 points · 315 comments · speckx

rozenmd · 1785939425 · focus · HN ↗
I liked Kenton's take on this: <a href="https://x.com/KentonVarda/status/2084990137180590572?s=20" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/KentonVarda/status/2084990137180590572?s=20
Text from tweet:
Today we are releasing Cloudflare OS, a chatbot with connectors, just like every other tech company is doing.
Except actually, it's different. This is a remake of Sandstorm[.]io, my startup from 10 years ago, except this time built on Cloudflare Workers (the platform I've spent the last 9 years building) and deeply leveraging AI. This is more or less the culmination of my secret 10-year master plan.
This is a full-on personal app vibe coding platform, in which the sandbox is so secure that you can pretty much go wild -- the AI cannot introduce a significant security bug. We believe a company's security team can feel comfortable giving non-technical users permission to vibe code and then sleep soundly at night.
How is that possible? It's the Sandstorm security model, revisited. A "Gadget" is the same thing as a Sandstorm "Grain": a fine-grained app instance. For example, if you have a document editor app, each document runs as a separate instance of the app, in a separate sandbox (one "Gadget").
This means two things, both of which I think are Big Deals: 1. The platform can manage all access control, by controlling who can access the Gadget at all. There is no way the Gadget can accidentally leak itself to an attacker -- even an attacker who has access to other Gadgets based on the same app. 2. Since everyone is running their own copy of the code, everyone can freely modify their copy of the code.
Think about #2 a bit more.
What if, when you wanted a new feature in the software you are using, you could just prompt your agent to add it?
This doesn't work in the cloud Software-as-a-Service model, because you are not running your own copy of the app.
Sandstorm tried to change that 10 years ago, but the world wasn't ready, because not enough people had the skills or patience to actually modify their software. AI has changed that. Now you just ask the agent -- the same agent that you are using to help you interact with the Gadget can also modify the code of the Gadget.
And it is so fun.
1. fny · 1785940510 · focus · HN ↗
  That should have been the announcement.
  The article posted buries the lead. Cloudflare OS reads like almost any other AI knowledge base until midway when apps are introduced and then becomes overly technical with a code snippet.
  1. kentonv · 1785941774 · focus · HN ↗
    We really struggled with how to present this to multiple audiences at once.
    My tweet thread, and the GitHub readme, is really the presentation intended for the HN crowd. The blog post is for a different audience.
    <a href="https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflare-os" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflare-os
    philistine · 1785942835 · focus · HN ↗
    > The blog post is for a different audience.
    No one? Like literally, I don't understand a thing of what the blog post is saying. It's vague to the point of meaning nothing. Every piece of text I've seen that explains CloudflareOS is clear except the blog post.
    QuantumNoodle · 1785946776 · focus · HN ↗
    I used to read their blog regularly because it had lots of interesting technical details. Lately, though, there’s less of that, and I can’t quite put my finger on what changed. My guess is that they realized how popular the blog had become and started using that attention more for advertising. There’s nothing wrong with that, but earlier the “advertisements” actually made me want to try things out and bring them back to my team. I even considered applying to work there. Not so much anymore. I’ve even removed it from my RSS feed.
    I don’t like offering criticism without a solution, but I’m not really motivated to come up with one here. It looks like employees may read this, so maybe someone will see the feedback.
    jtwocents · 1785957742 · focus · HN ↗
    <a href="https://blog.cloudflare.com/three-chapters-at-cloudflare-programmer-to-cto-to-board-of-directors/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.cloudflare.com/three-chapters-at-cloudflare-pro...
    TL;DR; jgc stopped editing the blog, and AI slop took over:
    > Today, after more than 13 years at the company, I am joining Cloudflare’s board of directors and retiring from my full-time position as CTO.
    > ...
    > I wrote for, and edited, the Cloudflare Blog for many, many years
    ljm · 1785970131 · focus · HN ↗
    Nothing ever improves in the tech scene... it just decays until someone challenges it.
    Funnily enough CF has redesigned its navigation several times in the past year, just like GitLab used to do. Shuffling the UI like a deck of cards is pretty desperate.
    lytedev · 1785987229 · focus · HN ↗
    Of course it improves! Had to decay from somewhere, didn't it?
    xyzzy_plugh · 1785955474 · focus · HN ↗
    This matches my perception of a ton of recent Cloudflare blog posts. I literally have no idea who they are targeting. It almost feels like they're targeting themselves.
    jorisw · 1785997251 · focus · HN ↗
    I believe this happens when someone decides on a particular cadence of posts rather than waiting until you actually have something to say
    ncr100 · 1786034789 · focus · HN ↗
    Curious if the tech writing team is drowning in work / underempowerment.
    nl · 1785985964 · focus · HN ↗
    I sent the blog post to someone right now because it had exactly the kinds of details they care about, with the appropriate level of technical details.
    richjdsmith · 1786034526 · focus · HN ↗
    It certainly feels like the copywriters at cloudflare received marching orders to write for a broader audience, which means, write for no one. I miss their more technical writing style.
    boredumb · 1785958131 · focus · HN ↗
    Launching just recently and having to think about how i'm marketing things more and more, the hardest parts to really market are the AI related features. Most of the real value AI provides isn't flashy its just eliminating the tedious work that sits between the interesting parts of a job: structuring messy data, extracting information from documents, validating it against references, filling out forms, routing it for approval, and preparing it for distribution. The exciting work was already exciting. AI just removes the friction between point A and point D. That's alot harder to demonstrate than generating an image or writing a paragraph. "Look, here's all the data you no longer have to enter manually" isn't exactly a compelling marketing headline, even if it's where users save the most time.
    I sometimes wonder who AI marketing is really for. The people who would benefit from eliminating repetitive work, or other technical people who want to see interesting AI demos.. A lot of product launches end up looking like "Here's a prompt that bootstraps X," when the bigger story is that the prompt replaces an hour of repetitive work that nobody wanted to do in the first place.
    niyikiza · 1785974129 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
    crazysim · 1785985445 · focus · HN ↗
    Why not a talk/demo video? Like Google Wave. Yeah I know that's probably not the best ~~success~~ example but it was a hell of a demo.
    kentonv · 1785986798 · focus · HN ↗
    <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmS5s6Wbin4" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmS5s6Wbin4 -- Talk / demo I gave at AI Engineer World's Fair last month. (Final branding was still in flux at the time so it is presented as "Gadgets".)
    Izikiel43 · 1785986355 · focus · HN ↗
    Are you hiring?
    kentonv · 1785986866 · focus · HN ↗
    Always!
    <a href="https://www.cloudflare.com/careers/jobs/?department=Emerging+Technology+%26+Incubation" rel="nofollow">https://www.cloudflare.com/careers/jobs/?department=Emerging...
  2. dofm · 1785941835 · focus · HN ↗
    Random trivia (and something I learned this way myself from an internet reply, though I can't remember when):
    What gets buried is the "lede". It is a really unusual thing — a deliberate, engineered misspelling of "lead" that leaked into broader use:
    <a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/bury-the-lede-versus-lead" rel="nofollow">https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/bury-the-lede-versu...
    (Not meant as a nit-pick — it's just something that adds really fascinating historical colour to a useful expression, that people often mistakenly re-correct)
    [deleted] · 1785945602 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
    reaperducer · 1785950820 · focus · HN ↗
    It's spelled "lede" so as not to be confused with "lead," as in the metal with which was used to print newspapers.
    Since "lead" (as in beginning of a story) and "lead" (as in metal) were frequently used in print newsrooms, the spelling of one changed over time to reduce confusion.
    There were a number of other language convolutions in newsrooms, such as "slug" which meant a piece of hot metal, and so was useful for describing a spent bullet, the very short text that served as a title for a particular story, and a section of metal letters on the printing press.
    /Worked for two major newspaper companies back when printing newspapers was akin to printing money.
    dofm · 1785952281 · focus · HN ↗
    “TK” meaning “to come” is another one. “More TK” in particular is now a blogger affectation but it seems to have been a way to communicate to an editor that a story was so far incomplete, within the text of a submission, without the editor assuming the words “to come” were part of the story. And elsewhere it indicates a placeholder that needs a fact to be confirmed and filled in before publication.
    reaperducer · 1785961747 · focus · HN ↗
    it seems to have been a way to communicate to an editor that a story was so far incomplete
    When the story was complete, the notification varied from newspaper to newspaper, but very often they followed the AP's convention of writing "-30-" which I have always believed was something the AP print wire actually (and surprisingly) adopted from the broadcast side, because broadcast stories were ideally 30 seconds long.
    glenstein · 1785954672 · focus · HN ↗
    Not sure why you got downvoted on this one. You're right and you even turned it into a bit of language history. It's bury the lede, and now I know why.
    dofm · 1785956997 · focus · HN ↗
    I think it was fair. I added the bit in brackets to clarify because maybe it had come across as a nit-pick.
    In my head there are corrections that are rude that I don't do, because I genuinely think authentic writing matters more and more, and because I am absolutely not above reproach where grammar and spelling is concerned.
    Then there are things I think people would want to know, that are either in the intellectual-you-have-a-little-bit-of-pinach-in-your-teeth territory or in the "cool fact" territory, or somewhere hazy in between.
    I figured if one is going to correctly use an expressive phrase like "bury the lede" that they've perhaps only ever heard someone say, they would absolutely want to know about the spelling quirk, because it fully makes it better.
    Other people obviously read it differently and the downvote was a useful signal.
  3. ljm · 1785968118 · focus · HN ↗
    The announcement reads like it's generated by AI. I opened it looking for a punch list of selling points but there was nothing. I figured it was just Cloudflare trying to do Cowork.
    The readme I generated for an agent I put on top of pi reads almost the same as this.
    AI does not do emotion. There is no punch, or pop. If I walk away from an announcement thinking it's AI slop then the announcement failed.
    It's nothing like the posts Cloudflare used to write.

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