Cloudflare's AI Psychosis: How the Infrastructure Giant Lost Its Way
A long-time Cloudflare user and small AI startup employee argues that the company has traded its engineering-first culture for a product-manager-driven obsession with AI features, leading to a sprawling, half-finished catalog of overlapping tools, unreliable documentation, and persistent outages. The post criticizes the DX, observability gaps, and a workforce cut framed as an 'agentic' move, while lamenting the loss of infrastructure expertise at the top.
This is what product managers do to an infrastructure company when nobody stops them: they optimize for announcement cadence and surface-area growth, and the coherent, trustworthy infrastructure layer that made Cloudflare matter gets harder to find under all the noise.
- reisse
> 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 and signed browser binaries?
- aleda145
Hard disagree. Sure their docs are bad, and it's sometimes buggy. But to me cloudflare is actually innovating and trying to offer "new" infrastructure. Durable objects and workers are super cool. R2 has free egress, isn't it insane that they could pull that off?
If what you want is a VM to run postgres then there are other offerings that would be much better.
Not saying they aren't evil though, they probably are, but the infra stuff is cool.
- alberth
What’s missed from the post is that Cloudflare for many years now has felt that they are a “Cloud 2.0” company.
And AWS/GCP/etc are “Cloud 1.0”.
They believe that AI Agent will fundamentally change the internet, and it’s hard to fault them for seeing it that way when their own stats shows that bot/agents account for the majority of Internet traffic.
As such, going all in on AI fits into their thesis of being “Cloud 2.0”.
- tosh
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 balance and probably a good idea to over-index on momentum and new stuff
while investing enough in hardening and improving the stuff that sticks
- sarreph
I have to say: Yes, there is a lot of velocity from Cloudflare pushing out AI-adjacent features as of late.
But also: What they've doing with Workers et al. has made them a platform for fully-fledged apps and deployments. I personally love the ecosystem and use it for all of my projects now. It's like the perfect blend of ease-of-use and DX of Heroku, and breadth of services of AWS / GCP. Well, maybe not quite AWS or GCP, but that's kind of the point -- they've created an opinionated system of "objects" that are all highly extensible to the point where in my opinion you can pretty much deploy anything you want on it.
It took me a bit of time to learn the "Cloudflare way" of doing things, but once I started making on it I saw just how flexible (and low cost!) everything is.