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Cloudflare adds real-time Markdown rendering for AI agents
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- jsheard 8mo agoThis text/markdown scheme feels like it's begging for adversarial shenanigans since it lets you serve different content to agents than humans, by design.
- thestackfox 8mo agoIf you’re willing to serve adversarial Markdown to agents, you’re already willing to cloak HTML.
- selcuka 8mo ago> it lets you serve different content to agents than humans You could always do that. The only difference is CloudFlare can now do this on-the-fly, automatically translating HTML to Markdown. My understanding is that you don't have control over the conversion.
- skybrian 8mo agoI wonder if this will also result in a better "readability" mode for human readers? You could do the Markdown to HTML conversion in the browser.
- 22c 8mo agoI can't help but feel there is a funny pattern going on. A lot of companies want to embrace AI, agents, etc. so they make their platforms easier to use by AI, implementing whatever the latest craze is. I imagine we're going to see a lot more APIs open up (agentic finances?), a lot of granular access controls, etc. Where was all of this when regular users had been asking for it for _years_? Empowering users in general is a good thing, so, in a way, it's a good thing that OpenClaw and things of this nature are exposing all the issues with access controls and API interactions that many of our services have. Now we just need a reason for AI agents to need "dark mode" on websites...
- skybrian 8mo agoMarkdown isn't so great for ads or for embedded videos.
- gnabgib 8mo agoTitle: Introducing Markdown for Agents > Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- AnonC 8mo agoHN mods, please update the title.
- tdehnke 8mo agoSeems odd to have it as paid feature (Pro plan or higher) if it will save on delivery costs etc for them.
- tekacs 8mo agoIt seems hard to tell what to think of a company that is simultaneously trying to poison the content that it sends to agents [1] and also doing things like this. I understand their arguments for it - and completely disagree - so I can't help but think that anyone who is on the pro-AI side of things would do well to steer clear of them if possible. [1]: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/03/cloudflare-turns-ai-against-itself-with-endless-maze-of-irrelevant-facts/ https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/03/cloudflare-turns-ai-again...
- laborcontract 8mo agoI was going to make some stupid joke in the comments saying that I thought this blog post would be about "Markdown.. on the edge!". After reading the blog, turns out it is about markdown on the edge. lmao.
- johaugum 8mo ago>We already see some of the most popular coding agents today – like Claude Code and OpenCode – send these accept headers with their requests for content. Expect this to be used to block agent traffic
- vg 8mo agothen the agents would request regular html when blocked
- countWSS 8mo agoThis seems useful beyond agents. It will save tons of traffic for scripts, text browsers, low-bandwidth connections,etc markdown is incredibly compact and easy to parse.
- rjtc 8mo agoRIP FireCrawl
- conartist6 8mo agoI still can't stand the idea that people now see their goal as serving agents as well as possible. They're not even coy about it so let me say it again: they're not working for the people using the agents, their working to serve the agents.
- QuantumNoodle 8mo agoI don't care about the AI implications but having someone put money into a flawless conversion of html into markdown will certainly improve terminal based web browsing :)
- vg 8mo agoSo they basically re-invented Gemini (the protocol not the AI model)
- upcoming-sesame 7mo agoany guess to what would be the tech they are using behind the scenes?