Building agents and the future for developers

Hello everyone and welcome to This Week in NET. It's the April 25th edition. Our developer week of early April brought a lot of excitement to the current and even maybe future developers. It was full of AI agents and several announcements. I'm João Tomé. I'm in our Cloudflare Lisbon office in Portugal where actually April 25th it's a national holiday. So in this episode we go into more detail with conversations with author Ashley Peacock that wrote a book about building with Cloudflare and also Sunil Pai from our AI agents team. The feedback about our developer week on social media was so amazing that will also take some time to show off some of those great comments online. One of the interesting things even for me and I don't work in our team that builds all of this developer tools is to see how from feedback of developers the team iterates so fast. So keep that feedback coming. Now let's start with Sunil Pai. Sunil is the founder of PartyKit, an open source deployment platform for AI agents acquired by Cloudflare in 2024 and he is a principal systems engineer that is building AI agents at Cloudflare. Sunil and Craig Dennis actually have also been doing these live shows called Dry Run that you can check on Cloudflare TV or on our developer YouTube channel. So here's Sunil. Hi my name is Sunil Pai. I'm a principal systems engineer at Cloudflare and I work on the AI agents project. We are here in the Cloudflare London office. I'm in the UK myself and one of my favorite releases from this week was the VEET plugin which seems like a fairly small thing but it opens up using Cloudflare Workers with all your favorite front-end frameworks and libraries and CSS and especially because previously it was a little hard to set up but now it just works out of the box combined with stuff like our new worker builds where you can just instantly with one click on like we have a new shiny deploy to Cloudflare button. It sets up your GitHub and your CI and preview URLs and just so many things out of the box in minutes flat. That I think was like one of my favorite announcements. The other thing I like is that a lot of interesting people from Cloudflare actually showed up to London this week. We had so many events. We had our developer week celebration in fact yesterday and it was so nice to meet everyone in the community and in this like remote friendly world it's really nice when everyone gathers in one place to like celebrate and have a good time. So it's been a wonderful week. There's a lot of feedback on social media but having this in-person connection also makes it worthwhile right? I like working from home don't get me wrong like I get like so much work done and I get to exercise and go for walks and all of that. I really really miss the people. One of the best things about working in Cloudflare is the people in fact. Everyone's so smart and so friendly and especially when we get together it's just a wonderful time. Can you explain this to us a bit on you have a agent hat which is really cool there's more people in the team that have one of those. Why for you agents is important? What do you think can be built with agents? I have a very boring explanation for why I think agents are such a big deal. Software is all about automation. Automation of processes, automation of boarding work, automation of menial work, automation behind the scenes where humans can instead focus on thinking and having more impact. Agents especially with LLMs and attached to like your own data sources and your own documents and your own internal business processes finally takes so much of that menial work away from humans and lets them focus on working on the things they actually care about about their business or like for themselves or building personal AI assistants and conveniently the Cloudflare Workers platform shout out to durable objects which is a big part of it has created a platform that's perfect for running these things on the edge platform literally 20 milliseconds away from you on well like I get like 15 millisecond latency here in fact in London. It really is a true age of software for a while it seemed very like hype or like hype generating but it's actually turning out to be quite useful for individual purposes but also like automating so many things in your business. Shout out to Matt Silverlock who made the cap we made a small batch of I think like eight caps so eight of these have gone out to people right now maybe we'll do another batch soon but right now it's my favorite cap. In the AI world and the agents world that you're speaking is there specifically like things that you spoke about opportunities but things that you think could be challenging as well in terms of people actually learning before just doing is there a challenge that could be there specifically? I keep thinking about it in the terms of don't get me wrong while I enjoy a good Studio Ghibli generation of my photos I think humans the value of human created art and effort is a lot more meaningful I think AI and AI agents for me personally they aim to remove toil and tedium from human life especially like at work and emails and things like that like I really like focusing on creation and innovation and those are things that people are still just way way better at and it's going to stay that way for a very very long time and no I actually don't really have a problem of easily spoon-fed information as long as you care enough to verify it so that like your AI hasn't hallucinated it but no I'm just generally like a big-time techno optimist and I love asking AI to teach me something new every day. If you look into the future where do you think this area agents the what is enabling there's a lot of talk about creative people that didn't know how to code now they don't need to where do you see that perspective of making building easier going? So I think what it does is it raises both the floor and the ceiling like even me like building a website that actually looks nice and feels good and is accessible would take a lot of time because of which I wouldn't even bother making so many projects despite knowing how to code I've been writing software for 20 years now and now I get to do it like really quickly and share ideas. What that means is that the floor is lifted for not just people like me but also people who haven't been coding or haven't ever coded in their life they are able to express their ideas as software and share it across the planet I think that's important but it also raises the ceiling because the expectations for software become so much higher in terms of polish, in terms of thought, in terms of intention, in terms of listening to your users feedback and doing more and those are things that I don't think AI can solve out of the box at least not for a while so I think AI and agents what it does is it definitely raises both the floor but also the ceiling because of user expectations. If you had to say one thing about Cloudflare that most people don't realize but they should or the Cloudflare developers platform, what would that be? Well, four years ago even though the cloud workers platform is more than this I don't know about seven years old now eight years old I don't remember I found out about it only four years ago and I was blown away and even over the last four years I think the fact that Cloudflare even has a developer platform was not a very well-known fact but it seems like that tide is turning social media the way that Cloudflare is telling its story is a lot better I don't know like we had developer week but honestly it feels like we've been shipping for the last two months on a daily basis. I can't keep up like every morning I have to go and check like my twitter to find out what Cloudflare has shipped in the last 24 hours and we always have people who go into our docs and they're like oh you have a browser rendering engine inside Cloudflare Workers that's weird I thought you just did javascript oh you have a vector database you have a this so I don't think it's one thing that would surprise people it's that it's just such a broad platform with so many features and it's becoming so much more accessible to developers on a given day. If there's one thing that I would say I would recommend people build their weekend or side projects on Cloudflare Workers it is a wonderful wonderful platform and the free plan is so generous in fact I think that's the thing I think the Cloudflare free plan is so much more generous than any other provider out there where you can get things to production without ever putting in the credit card number so I would recommend trying out your next side project with our unique extremely cool edge scaling platform with durable objects and AI agents and stuff and you would be surprised at all the things you can do without needing to install like use another third-party service it's crazy it's quite wild and just to wrap things up about the AI age that is called AI age about agents what is the thing that you think most people don't realize and they should one is I because the models have been getting so have been getting better so quickly I don't think people realize how ready they are for day-to-day activities one of my predictions is that almost at least every developer if not every human being is going to have a little personal AI assistant that they use and talk to by the end of the year. One of the other pitches I make is that developers for the last 10 years people have been making a website as their side project on weekends by the end of the year everyone is going to be making little personal AI assistants by the end of for themselves and it's because technology goes through a paradigm shift where it starts off as being expensive and the purview of subject matter experts and billion dollar companies and they get commodified to the point that hackers enthusiasts stinkers like me can write it in a few lines of code and I think we are almost there you should use the AI agents SDK to do that but I suspect it's going to be so much more widespread and mainstream by the end of the year simply because the models have gotten good and the infrastructure app player is like so fun to hack on right now. Would you like to be a young person doing a code and starting things right now? Oh yeah amazing it's in fact I was taught how to use AI code editors by the interns at Cloudflare shout out to Dravya he sat me down and he's like this is what cursor is and I was blown away. The younger people have such a leg up they get to especially because they're born into the style of coding and the capabilities that are I can't imagine how wonderful it must be to be able to play in the space at the moment it's crazy. Now it's time to talk with Ashley Peacock a British engineer and Cloudflare dev expert that even has a book called serverless apps on Cloudflare. We spoke with him a couple weeks ago during our connect event in London. Small note when we spoke Cloudflare containers wasn't still announced now it is it's coming in open beta this June it will help developers run full Linux apps in any language with more memory and CPU so it will be completely integrated with our workers platform and it will be simple and scalable so it will help those that want like lightweight portable environments that package code and dependencies to run anywhere so here's Ashley. I'm Ashley Peacock I am a software engineer for an insurance company in London and I'm also a Cloudflare dev expert which is very similar to like an AWS hero so I'm very involved in the Cloudflare community as an engineer. So for me I think I did a talk today here at Cloudflare connect where I talked about the undifferentiated heavy lifting that Cloudflare can do it's like what AWS was kind of founded on and I think Cloudflare kind of takes that to the next level it can really empower developers to move really quickly ship things really fast thanks to things like their really good client developer experience that they bring and the suite of kind of products that they bring is just everything you would need to build an app is now available through their dev platform. Specifically about developer week that is ongoing there's still a day to end what do you think about the recent announcements anything in particular that pops I think today was a really big one I think D1 read replication is huge because before your databases you know when you're using workers they're in one location but now they are available globally which is it makes them a lot more usable because otherwise the latency was was quite high and the announcement about R2 and how you can use it with iceberg tables I think will be really I think it'd be really disruptive because data warehouse storage is really expensive and R2 has no egress fees so it could be it could be a real game changer I think that one specifically in terms of what these tools are allowing you to build and do where do you put the your hopes up in terms of the ability of doing things quicker easier in a sense what are the main main gains that you see in the current situation for development specifically for dev week um I think like the one I just talked about the iceberg tables like you could easily lift and shift what you're currently using for your data warehousing move it to R2 and you're probably going to make probably quite a considerable kind of cost saving I think for me what makes what allows me to go quickly is like I mentioned the developer experience so they have a suite of products databases caches etc and if I'm building on AWS I probably have to faff around with docker containers when I'm running locally but with Cloudflare I can just run everything locally it's all emulated and that saves me so much time and then when I deploy it I just know that it's it's all taken care of for me so I can deploy a worker it's available globally and it just makes my life so much easier I can just move move so much quicker and I often say focus on the things I enjoy which is writing code I don't worry about that caches and databases and whatever I just want them to to be there and then I can just use them whenever I like if you have one or three or five requests to do to the team in terms of like a feature you would really want to see happening or even a product maybe what would that be I think I can just go for a few I think the terraform support is good but I think it could be improved a little more kind of wider I guess like some of the new products don't have terraform modules yet that'd be nice I think splitting apart Cloudflare accounts because at the moment you don't have like organizations I think it's been talked about in a few blog posts but nothing official has kind of come out yet and that's really important to separate production staging and make sure you don't have any kind of accidents and similarly to that I think with the secret store that was announced this week I think that's a really good addition to prevent you duplicating your secrets across workers and it can it comes with role-based access control which isn't the same for every Cloudflare product so I'd want to see that role-based access control kind of spread out across all the products and really kind of improve that and if I pick one more it would be kind of better observability into durable objects because I love durable objects they've been talked about a lot here today I think they're awesome but trying to see what's happening inside is actually quite difficult and there are some tools out there but it'd be nice to see that kind of brought in-house natively for those who don't know too much about Cloudflare as a developer platform as an ecosystem what are the main things that you think are worthwhile exploring as a starting point that you can suggest people to do I feel like the developer platform these days is if you'd asked me that question two or three years ago I've said oh it's missing this it's missing this it's missing this and I feel like it now has all the essential building blocks of what any engineer needs to build the majority of web apps right some web apps have specific requirements that you might need to go off and use another provider but most websites really are front ends and back ends and some storage and I think Cloudflare has all those all those pieces so honestly I think if you're doing a project a side project wherever it might be I would just give Cloudflare a go read the docs you can spin up a project with npm create Cloudflare and it will just bootstrap the entire thing for you and then one more command you can deploy it and in the time I took to explain this you could have deployed an app into Cloudflare that's how quick it is specifically on this ai era let's call it like that uh what are the advantages in general for the industry for your work that you see that are advantages that were not possible before and are now possible where do you think the the coding the developer perspective is with there's a lot of talk about mcv servers what where in agents where are those areas going for me specifically I use cursor so an ide powered by ai and I find it really allows me to move really quickly especially if I'm like prototyping or starting a new project you can move really quickly but I've even used it in my day job on a code base that is millions of lines long and if you if you know kind of what you need to do to make that change you can explain it to the ai and it does a pretty solid job genuinely honestly you might have to tweak it a little bit but I find it just kind of lets you move a little bit a little bit quicker than you could before it kind of predict what you might need to do and particularly I think I find it interesting to work on ai projects so in my day job I'm working on some some ai features and a really easy example is in in the US insurance is not as as common to buy online so you might not know what kind of trade you are as a business and we basically built a feature using ai that basically they could type in natural language what they do and we would map it and we saw a huge increase in the number of people that could select their trade so I think there's there's lots of low -hanging fruit where natural language and ai can be slotted into existing businesses that just provides value do you wish this was around a few years ago when we were starting in terms of what it accomplished I think it can get people up to speed quicker but I think if you were if you're new into the space a new engineer I think it can also be a bit of a pitfall in the you might you might not fully understand what you're doing you're just letting the ai do it for you so I think there's something to be said for if you're a bit early in your career leaning less on the ai which is hard I think you can certainly ask you know co-pilot questions but maybe don't let it write the code so much and and do it yourself but yeah I think it would be nice it would let me move quicker for sure actually on that regard the the challenges that you see with ai recursor there's a lot of benefits but do you see also challenges issues in terms of even young folks not learning what they should because it's too easy yeah I think that's yeah I think that's totally fair I think it's definitely gonna happen because you see these things online there's these kind of famous like twitter posts or x posts whatever whatever you want to call it these days where I think some guy like vibe coded basically a sass and he went he went live and it was quite populated it did well which is awesome but then all of a sudden he was kind of basically exposed with like security leaks and he was basically posting like please someone help me like curse I can't fix it I need someone to fix it and these things are going to become more and more common but more worryingly you don't know if the app you're using is built by someone that knows what they're doing or someone that doesn't so on the one hand I think it's awesome that enabled that person to to do that but ultimately it's also going to cause a lot of problems if there is one thing that people should know about lauter but most of them probably don't know what would that be I mean honestly that they have a developer platform at all like the number of people that I speak to just don't know they do it they think it's you know a cdn and some ddos protection and they don't really know about the developer platform so we've talked about the developer platform a lot um so it really is the developer platform if you want to look into one thing just because I think it's it's completely unique is durable objects because they're very different to anything I guarantee you've seen it before um but give them a few attempts because sometimes I was in a talk earlier where they were like the first time you use durable objects you're not really sure what it is you might hate it but then use it a few more times and you then it really starts to click of yeah of what you can do with durable objects explain for those who don't know what is the real so you can effectively you can imagine like you can spin up an infinite almost number of mini servers on demand so you can basically say at runtime give me a new one with an id the easiest way I always explain it is most people have used slack or teams where you have different channels each that each of those channels could be a durable object and the durable object comes with built-in storage so up to 10 gig of data in a sequel like database and it comes with web sockets so it's great for multiplayer and collaboration and even just if you're using it not for those things it has rpc interfaces so you write the code in like a class in your in your ide but it's actually persisted on a server in a single location it's durable and the storage is durable so it can go to sleep and then it'll wake up whenever it handles the request and the same for web sockets so if you're using api gateway you pay for while that connection is open to api gateway on aws with Cloudflare your your durable object it hibernates and goes to so you could have a thousand people connected to your your application and if no one's sending any messages you're not you're not paying anything you're only paying when the messages come in but it's such a powerful primitive with i think i've only covered a few of the features it has but it's really powerful in terms of the Internet in general what would be your wish list for the Internet not necessarily for developers for the Internet like where is it going what can people achieve with it for the future would be more related to what you do or not but be more general i think for me maybe a fairer Internet i feel like it's getting kind of a little monopolized right the Internet originally and it's obviously happened over time but it was very open and very free and i feel like the power of the Internet is going into the hands of you know the anthropics of the world the open ai the google's etc it's been going that way for for a long time i think Cloudflare i think i can't remember the exact saying but they believe in they definitely believe in like a free and open Internet which is one of the reasons why you know i'm more than happy to support them on like a community level but yeah for me i think it's keeping the Internet open free accessible for everyone um yeah also this week youtube celebrated on wednesday the 20th anniversary of its first video upload was on april the 23rd 2005 so 20 years ago was titled me at the zoo so because of that we looked into our clothar radar tool and there we have our dns based ranking and youtube in the category of video streaming is number one ahead of netflix so that's just a curiosity of this week in our vlog this week we had our q1 2025 Internet disruption summary from david belson it was also from a team i work closely with the radar team disruptions were driven by cyber attacks cable cuts and natural disasters even like the earthquake in myanmar also the fires in california so you can check that blog out we also have kelly russell explaining why she joined clothler as chief people officer welcome to clothler kelly and also mark jenkins in another blog post about why he joined clothler to build world -class partnerships in emia in europe welcome mark and also now it's time for social love some social love you got during our developer week it was an incredible developer week for Cloudflare not just in product launches but in how the community responded we'll start with lindo.ai who shared their excitement after migrating from aws to Cloudflare then came theo from t3.gg stunned by the announcement that Cloudflare now supports docker containers containers coming in june 2025 kent c dodds chimed in to praise our tools quoting rita kosloff's walkthrough of autorag the new way to embed and query your own data effortlessly on Cloudflare sam goodwin was loving how simple our platform makes things saying that Cloudflare replaces a whole bunch of aws tools with just fetch over on lost and founding's feed we got a full list of favorites d1 read replicas autorag streaming ingestion and pipelines plus nice quality of life improvements like secrets management and easy github deploys william allen kept it simple my colleagues know only one mode shipping peter pastore has celebrated that durable objects are now part of the workers free plan highlighting their use for real-time session storage and react apps security was also in the spotlight yankel shenkelman emphasized how Cloudflare support for mcp and ai agents along with tools like auth zero makes it easier than ever to build secure agentic systems and finally jeff weinstein noted that the ai agent stack is quickly coming together especially with the latest mcp integrations and built-in auth david soria para called for more engagement around mcp security wanting to build safer foundations together and liad yosef shared how his team put our platform to the test with a full migration of a complex mcp server and it went smooth martin was excited about remote mcps being dead easy to implement while sumai added a one-click deploy to Cloudflare button to github for go projects peter pistorius even laid out what he called the best modern stack Cloudflare top to bottom from storage to ai to real-time streaming we also saw design love nada shared her work on the agent site saying the scroll interaction was her favorite part nico botha became a new fan of the platform impressed by how much we've shipped lately calling it more than just a d-dos shield estaban was wowed by autorag his site was vectorized in under a minute and adams celebrated launching the first fully serverless email service on Cloudflare mert kosioglu shared how the model context protocol.com platform runs fully on Cloudflare using pages workers durable objects and Cloudflare registrar then there's a heartfelt blog post from reconfigured.io titled why Cloudflare is the perfect infrastructure for building ai applications it calls Cloudflare the perfect tool for the job especially for building remote mcp servers a love letter to Cloudflare literally