Cloudflare's AI Psychosis

The author fondly recalls Cloudflare's early days as a lean, reliable infrastructure layer—blocking attacks, caching static content, and handling DNS without extra baggage. They note Cloudflare now routes about 1 in 3 web requests and its stock is at an all-time high, but argue the company has lost touch with its engineering-first ethos.

They criticize what they call 'AI psychosis'—a 'dream it -> vibe it -> ship it' mindset driven by product managers rather than engineers. This has resulted in more frequent outages (citing the React useEffect incident) and a developer experience that feels bolted on. They also point to product sprawl in data storage: D1, Durable Objects, KV, R2, Queues, and Hyperdrive, yet still no first-class managed PostgreSQL that feels native. The author concludes that Cloudflare is being product-managed into the very complexity it used to solve.