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The reason this blog post does not come with any concrete examples how to use this enablement for useful and constructive things tells you something very import

by _pdp_ 5mo ago

The reason this blog post does not come with any concrete examples how to use this enablement for useful and constructive things tells you something very important - it is a toy and they do not know who and how they will use it. It is cool feature but to what end? Buying a domain is not something you have to do daily to require any kind of automation. I am also not sure who Stripe Atlas for. I am genuinely confused. It is definitely not something a developer will use. I understand that you can bootstrap a number of systems but that is like half-hour of work and arguably it is probably a good idea to do it manually to make sure you have strong foundations. I've have personally never seen a good example where a cross vendor account provisioning actually working. For example, Fly.io used to provision Sentry accounts automatically which you could not access in any other way but through Fly.io. I mean the Sentry account was effectively locked to a project that you cannot transfer - hijacking the actual global alias as well. Vercel did something similar with PostgreSQL via Neon and Redis via Upstash resulting in painful migration processes. I can imagine ending in some kind of deadlock between services due to security hence why the 30 minutes initial setup is kind of time well spent to avoid future issues. Maybe it's me.

hulitu 5mo ago
> it is a toy and they do not know who and how they will use it. Just like it is usually used: spam and (D)DoS
cromka 5mo ago
> Buying a domain is not something you have to do daily to require any kind of automation. Sorry, but no, you totally miss the fact there are domain farms which buy the dropped domains and then offer them up for sale. Bots now use AI to analyze the domain's value and automate the whole process. To be able to let AI buy it as well likely offers a tremendous amount of time saving.
- misnome 5mo ago
  Hasn’t all that been automated by people for decades anyway? I guess this, lowers the barrier to entry for this extremely specific niche?
- przmk 5mo ago
  It offers value to parasites who buy domains and resell them?
  - estimator7292 5mo ago
    Cloudflare gets a cut though, so it's valuable. As long as number go up, all good
    - adventured 5mo ago
      Cloudflare operates as an at-cost registrar. They charge wholesale prices for domains. What cut are you talking about?
      - pocksuppet 5mo ago
        They may be wrong on that particular point, but Cloudflare definitely profits from increased crime as it drives increased sales of Cloudflare's security products. There are rumors they even knowingly help protect DDoS botnets because they benefit from there being more DDoS.
- 2000UltraDeluxe 5mo ago
  It's not like there aren't others who sell domains with an API. This doesn't change that much.
- fontain 5mo ago
  Complete and utter nonsense. Domain registration is already API driven and has been for decades. The most sophisticated domain name investors (or "domain farms") go as far as to own registrars directly so they have instant access to the registries. Nobody involved in domains would use Cloudflare's product because they already have and have had automations for decades. For example, DropCatch (NameBright) own over 1,000 different registrars so that they have over 1,000 direct routes to Verisign's .com registry. GName are a new player in the space, approaching 1,000 registrars. The amount these companies spend on their registrar licensing alone is many millions of dollars[1]. Cloudflare's product adds nothing new to the world of domains. Anyone has been able to go to OpenSRS and sign up as a reseller with API access for over 20 years. [1] The majority of ICANN's registrar revenue comes from just a few companies that own thousands of registrars collectively: https://www.iana.org/assignments/registrar-ids/registrar-ids.xhtml https://www.iana.org/assignments/registrar-ids/registrar-ids... cmd + f "DropCatch" and "GName"
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
- Griffinsauce 5mo ago
  So actively making the internet worse. Awesome.
- dawnerd 5mo ago
  And that goes back way further than AI. We were doing some crazy stuff at Demand Media with enom and all their fake content sites.
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
grey-area 5mo ago
Perfect for spammers, scammers and domain squatters, who can now automate their activities even more. Can’t think of any other uses for this given the current state of LLM ‘agents’, though I can’t wait for the next report of something like ‘openclaw registered 1000 domains for me without asking and now cloudflare won’t refund me’.
- PunchyHamster 5mo ago
  scamming appears to be lone industry where LLMs are truly a 10x revolution
  - timacles 5mo ago
    scamming and advertising. Generate hyper personalized ads in any format! Embed them stealthily into virtually any context! I guarantee thats all big tech is thinking about as the future of LLMs. All this coding stuff is merely a good will investment to buy them time until they can implement this
    - tardedmeme 5mo ago
      My former employer is now generating AI video ads tailored to the specific user.
- riedel 5mo ago
  And cloudflare can actually sell them priority access to pass their bot protection or introduce micropaiments for agents access content. I feel cloudflare is getting a bit scary tbh. It is like your friendly bot net.
  - adamas 5mo ago
    I mean, Cloudflare was always kind of scary. They filter the world wide web, literally.
    - 2ndorderthought 5mo ago
compounding_it 5mo ago
> to what end? People making cooking websites, websites for their garden, etc usually have nowhere to go. A web app who is an agent for a customer will then deploy agents in the backend to deploy the website too. Basically what one would do manually, you tell one agent to make another agent do it. Meta agents are where are going it seems.
- tdeck 5mo ago
  > People making cooking websites, websites for their garden, etc usually have nowhere to go. They've had WYSIWYG website builders since the late 1990s.
  - carlosjobim 5mo ago
    They don't have anymore. At least not since Artisteer shut down.
    - tdeck 5mo ago
      What about SquareSpace and the like?
      - carlosjobim 5mo ago
        It's certainly a great and useful tool. But it's a website maker somewhat in the same way that a Facebook page or Instagram account is a website maker. AFAIK you can't make a website on SquareSpace and download it to your computer, edit it locally and move it to a different host, etc. In the past there were actual WYSIWYG editors which let you design your website or CMS theme and then do whatever you wished with it. Artisteer was the pinnacle of this. Then nerds took over with their command lines and Kubernetes. Imagine if one day people decided that making and editing documents in Word was no longer possible, that they had to be hand coded and command line compiled and linted, and not mix tabs and spaces. That's what happened to website publishing. For no reason at all.
        5mo ago
terrytys 5mo ago
lol, there are lots of people who aren't developers.
ascorbic 5mo ago
People use agents to deploy sites all the time. Buying a domain is part of that if you want to build a site that's beyond a toy. Allowing agents to do a task isn't just for things you do every day – it's also for things you do rarely and need agents' help. It's not just devs using agents to perform these sort of tasks anymore. Stripe Atlas makes it massively easier for startups to incorporate in Delaware. This is particularly hard for non-US founders. It solves a real problem. I don't think this part will be done by agents though! Disclaimer: I work at Cloudflare but not on this
- makeitdouble 5mo ago
  Wouldn't it be critical if the agent botched the domain purchase in weird ways ? Short of throwaway sites (spam etc) it's hard to imagine skimping time on this specific, mostly painless part.
  - ascorbic 5mo ago
    If the rest of your deployment flow is via the agent, needing to switch over to a different context and open up a browser and login (or create an account) and buy the domain absolutely is a bump in the road.
    - makeitdouble 5mo ago
      [dead]
  - barnabee 5mo ago
    People are skimping time in every part. I am watching people who can't code build and deploy dashboards and sites with Claude Code (desktop app - they don't use the CLI), then go cap in hand to developer friends to get it hosted on a domain (rather than some Vercel or whatever URL). Those people absolutely want to risk letting an agent buy and set up the domain. This is not necessarily as blindly stupid as you might think. Many of these people know that this workflow is no good for writing code that does anything serious (i.e. storing data for people, taking payments, etc.) but there are a huge number of projects that are just websites, dashboard, data visualisations, etc. with static content and public APIs (Twitter is awash with them) and domains are cheap. A decent minority of these are even quite cool or interesting. So a lot of people want to put their vibe-coded weekend project behind a nice domain. Why not?
nottorp 5mo ago
It's a sales tool. You can tell Claude to add a new condition to an if and instead it will duplicate the whole if body. They're hoping you'll tell your "agent" to buy a domain and it will buy 30 instead.
lxgr 5mo ago
> Buying a domain is not something you have to do daily to require any kind of automation. Which is arguably unfortunate, as it nudges people towards using centralized services because they simply don't know that they have the option to register one. For example, why not self-host a single-page party invitation site designed by an agent rather than using Facebook or Instagram?
- ACCount37 5mo ago
  A lot of what enabled Web 1.0 was how easy it was for an average web user to create his own website. An average web user got far less technical since, and making a website got harder instead. Now, if anyone could just ask an AI agent to set up a website, and get a personal page with an e-mail inbox and a domain - all reasonably secure, TLS set up, billing added as +$5 per year to the AI subscription bundle? Maybe that would help some.
  - lxgr 5mo ago
    Yes, this is exactly my hope too. Many hacker/cypherpunk ideas failed or never reached wide adoption because they were just too complicated for regular people: GPG/web of trust, self-hosting websites and email, having your own custom software for personal tasks… Instead, everybody ended up using Gmail, iMessage/WhatsApp, and Facebook, and things are as centralized as they can be. Agents could be a force in breaking that trend. Even if inference stays centralized, the artifacts agents create would not be. Basically the difference between everybody renting from one of a handful apartment building mega corps or being able to hire contractors to build your own things according to your ideas. And just like there, it’ll probably help a lot to know a bit about how the sausage is made to not be taken advantage of. Also, many people will probably always continue to rent, which is fine. But the possibility of agent competition alone will hopefully keep centralized platforms and SaaS offerings on their toes, which is good for their users.
    - disiplus 5mo ago
      The problem is not website, the problem is discovery and discovery is on Instagram, TikTok, and social networks. You don't have any incentive to build a website for a regular audience. What you might do is build an audience on a social network and then try to move them to a website. But at that point you're big enough to build it properly.
Eufrat 5mo ago
> It is cool feature but to what end? Doesn’t this sum up most of the AI “innovations” we’ve seen shoveled in this bubble? We constantly see AI thought leaders backpeddling on promises and just spouting general nonsense. Altman originally talked effusively about an era of “abundance”. An abundance of what? It’s a word salad of feel good vibes without any substance. Sam Altman has gone from claiming AI might cure cancer to shoveling ads and the scope of AI seems to be reduced to mostly be suitable as flawed, imperfect, but mildly useful coding/automation agents that are likely subsidized beyond economic viability, but you can’t point that out because it’s the future!
mpeg 5mo ago
I think this post needs to be put in context, for months now Cloudflare has been releasing products that allow their whole platform to be usable by agents with the main objective of enabling their customers to dynamically write code using Cloudflare, this is just another step. For example, you can now with Artifacts and Dynamic Workers make a lovable-style SaaS where your customers ask the AI agent to write software for them, the agent can run it in sandboxes with no build step, it can version it with a git-compatible API, and now you can even have it buy a domain for the end customer or set up their own cloudflare account when they want to move to production. I personally have no use case for creating domains via agents, but some of the other features they're releasing around this area are extremely useful and I've started to ship internal tools for my clients where they are used, like giving them their own mini claude code that only does one thing – one I shipped last week was an agentic interface for Salesforce reports that understands their domain better (and all the undocumented tech debt) than the built-in Salesforce AI does and therefore manages the context better
- 7thpower 5mo ago
  Keep going…
  - mpeg 5mo ago
    Huh? Haha I swear I’m not a sockpuppet or getting paid by cloudflare (I wish!) I just like their products
    - 7thpower 5mo ago
      No I am genuinely curious :)
      - mpeg 5mo ago
        On the tooling I've made? Feel free to ask here or via email, the Salesforce one was for a fairly large (50k+ employees) company that uses it very extensively but as it often happens they're stuck with a ton of legacy crap. They have some of the AI tooling from SFDC but barely use it (lack of training, or interest) so this solves their immediate problem. I'm very keen to use their new dynamic workflows (cf's durable execution engine) which would let agents write workflow steps, that way my users can ask an agent to do stuff like "run this report daily and email it to me" and it can work with minimal setup (very basic example, but you get the idea)
huijzer 5mo ago
My biggest hesitation with these things is that there is no limit to the possible bill I may receive when the agent goes haywire. Cloudflare doesn’t see this as a problem of course.
- philipallstar 5mo ago
  It's not Cloudflare's job to see what you choose to buy as a problem.
  - brazzy 5mo ago
    I'd assume they want to limit the number of bills that will get disputed.
- input_sh 5mo ago
  There's a whole payment section in the submitted article which addresses your concern, perhaps you should read it.
frevib 5mo ago
> I've have personally never seen a good example where a cross vendor account provisioning actually working. At enterprise level, account provisioning with SCIM is the industry standard.
barnabee 5mo ago
A lot of good and interesting things started out as toys We should build more toys
- jeremyjh 5mo ago
  I don't think there are a lot in the SAAS world. Usually when something quirky and new launches, readers on this website can discern something about useful intent. Arguably Github, Slack, Twitch, TikTok were basically toys at launch with a lot of people questioning possible market fit. But there is a difference between those products - and for example - everything that came out of the crypto blockchain scene. This new product by Cloudflare feels more in the latter camp than the former.
  - fragmede 5mo ago
    Slack, of course, came out of a video game company pivot. Dropbox is famous here because of that one take. The need to allow very intelligent people to be whimsical is maybe best captured by Richard Feynman spinning dinner plates at the cafeteria, which would later lead him to a Nobel Prize for it.
aniviacat 5mo ago
I assume the constructive use case is some non-techy person asking ChatGPT. > Hey, please make me a website about my dog woofy. Give it the link myfluffywoofy.dog ;) Thank you!
nailer 5mo ago
> Buying a domain is not something you have to do daily to require any kind of automation I wrote a python client for dnsimple nearly 16 years ago to exactly that. If you can’t think of a reason it’s useful, you may wish to get your agent to buy a domain for some project you have asked to create.
NikolaosC 5mo ago
[dead]
zsoltkacsandi 5mo ago
> The reason this blog post does not come with any concrete examples how to use this enablement for useful and constructive things tells you something very important - it is a toy and they do not know who and how they will use it. Every time I come across AI projects and AI integrations (including my previous job where I full-time worked on one), no one was able to show me concrete examples how can I use it for constructive things.
nerdsniper 5mo ago
> I am also not sure who Stripe Atlas for. It's for founders who don't have lawyers. My co-founder and I are both developers, we used Stripe Atlas to incorporate a C-Corp due to expecting to fundraise <1 year after incorporation. Stripe Atlas generates about 200 pages of legal boilerplate documents with very sane defaults so that your corporate structure, bylaws, IP protections, director indemnity, etc. align well with investor expectations. It helps investors not have to "rules-lawyer" all your corporate records during due-diligence, because their content exactly matches YC's expectations. ------- I said we made a C-Corp but other founders should default to LLC, which Stripe Atlas can also streamline. An LLC is superior to C-Corp in pretty much every way for any pre-raise founders who don't have an extra $2,000 to >$10,000/year they're willing to part with for higher franchise taxes, "foreign" (different state) corporation registration, CPA's, and additionally lawyers if any investments aren't YC SAFE's (e.g. not YC, Neo, or A16Z SpeedRun). Also note that for pre-revenue C-Corps, Delaware franchise taxes are scaled against number of shares, not company revenue or # of employees, so you can save some money by forming your company with 1,000,000 shares and then file a "Unanimous action of the board of directors" to increase it to 10,000,000 just before angel/pre-seed/seed round, and potentially save a few hundred dollars on your first year franchise taxes, depending on when you incorporate and raise. But if a few hundred dollars makes a difference to you, incorporating as an LLC instead of a C-Corp is the only defensible decision. And as always, start your taxes 3-4 months before they're due. If you want a CPA to do them (which you should if you have any revenue), you'll need to retain them way ahead of time for C-Corps. If you're filling tax forms out yourself, you'll want to start at least a month before they're due.
- weird-eye-issue 5mo ago
  Yes unless you have a very very very good reason it's always best to just file a basic LLC in the state you are a resident of. Only costs a few hundred dollars at most and doesn't really complicate taxes
  - loeber 5mo ago
    This is totally false, sorry. Delaware entities are the standard. Delaware corporate law is better understood than any other by a long shot. Dealing with a random non-Delaware LLC is usually a hint that your counterparty is a rube.
konschubert 5mo ago
I’m not saying that you’re wrong. But it’s worth noting that any good technology starts off being called a toy and with most people not being able to imagine its usefulness.
- rrr_oh_man 5mo ago
  Yeah, like blockchain. (Sorry for the snark, I'm hangry)
  - tardedmeme 5mo ago
    And metaverse.
- bjacobel 5mo ago
  There are also a lot of bad technologies that start off being called a toy and then just die. Many more, I'd wager.
dizhn 5mo ago
This when their web GUI only allows buying one domain name at a time.
rco8786 5mo ago
> I am also not sure who Stripe Atlas for. This was such a weird mention to see in the article. Stripe Atlas is a service that helps new businesses incorporate and onboard onto Stripe/partner services with some startup credits. It's been around forever, has nothing to do with AI, and is generally a very well-respected service.
21asdffdsa12 5mo ago
It makes deployment for stuff easier for felix and co.. https://x.com/Etherealize_io/status/2042284300029345910 https://x.com/Etherealize_io/status/2042284300029345910
2ndorderthought 5mo ago
I am curious. Say, cloudflare let's Mr doofus run 4 agents from AI provider X. Those agents go on to create a pyramid scheme, prompted or not(both cases are interesting to me). The agents are running code in infrastructure owned by a third party cloud provider. The law catches up with the bots many years later after people lose a couple million. Who is at fault? I think cloudflare is in the clear. Mr doofus could argue that the AI company allowed or enabled the crime which they otherwise wouldn't have done. Or Mr doofus could claim his prompts shouldn't have lead to that outcome and that wasn't his intent at all. Making the bots at fault, but not the AI company I guess?
lxgr 5mo ago
> I've have personally never seen a good example where a cross vendor account provisioning actually working. That's not what this is though, is it? In other words, isn't the (anti-)pattern you describe an argument in favor of agents setting up your accounts instead? You can tell your agent to buy the domain at registrar x, manage DNS at y (and maybe configure DDoS protection and CDN), and host your content at z, and if the agent is good enough, you don't even need to understand the details. You end up with individual credentials for each service, rather than a web of account relationships managed by a single "portal" SaaS.
deadbabe 5mo ago
Typical engineer thinking. If you want an end to end automation solution, you have to automate everything, not just high frequency tasks. It’s not acceptable to just say “oh you can automatically deploy a new site but first you have to register an account and buy a little domain”. The user command is “deploy site, right NOW”.
brightball 5mo ago
I remember back in the day Heroku had a huge store of integrations that you could just turn on with a click and they worked like that. You'd get a New Relic account that was tailored to dyno performance and you accessed it via your Heroku dashboard. It became "the way" a lot of these PaaS systems operated and I'm sure the goal was to get some percentage once you increased your usage from the free tier, which makes sense for the PaaS partner.
- xp84 5mo ago
  > I'm sure the goal was to get some percentage For sure, revshare is standard on those partnerships. Fun(ny) fact: all the companies that started out on Heroku back then are still locked into those Heroku-captive tenant accounts on those partners, because contractually, the partner is not allowed to transition such an account to direct billing. One company I've worked with has had all their infra moved off Heroku for almost a decade, but their Sendgrid account, which has hundreds of subtenants that each have custom domains configured, still can only be logged into via Heroku. They'd have to rebuild that whole thing from scratch (including make all their customers redo DNS validation) to move to a real sendgrid account. I'm sure Heroku earns Salesforce a really healthy revenue stream based on this.
giancarlostoro 5mo ago
> The reason this blog post does not come with any concrete examples how to use this enablement for useful and constructive things tells you something very important - it is a toy and they do not know who and how they will use it. I've been wondering the same thing. What would have stopped me from using a model to talk to their APIs in an autonomous way anyway? Are you going to captcha my bot from running scripts to hit your API end-points? How can you tell its not my automated scripts vs an agent vs me testing?
smrtinsert 5mo ago
I'm probably very out of date here, but I thought domains weren't allowed to be purchased programmatically due to misuse, crime, fraud etc. Why is it allowed now just because of agents? This is bonkers to me.
zaidf 5mo ago
An entire generation of non developers are being onboarded to products built for developers because of AI. Exampl: a very non technical friend has built a bunch of business automations with Claude and a few days ago he just dropped in the conversation that he is using Cloudflare. “For what?” I asked because usually Claude will recommend Cercel before Cloudflare. But in this case, it recommended Cloudflare because of the Tunnels feature. Now he is using it for a lot more than Tunnels. Mostly just lets Claude use it whenever it makes sense. “To what end?” was the default reaction when Amazon launched S3 in mid 2000s :)
zeroq 5mo ago
It's not about concrete examples. Seasoned, well trained engineers have created hundreds of thousands in billing on AWS through a simple mistakes overnight. It's immediately reminds me of putting microtransactions into children games on mobile devices - a venue that has been thoroughly explored some 10-15 years ago. I can't see payment and provisioning as a blocker in any scenario. This has a potential to create a massive yet very dubious income stream for the company.
loeber 5mo ago
Downvoted. Stripe Atlas is a massively successful service that handles 100K+ incorporations annually. It's a key piece of Stripe's ecosystem support. You writing that you're "not sure who it's for" suggests to me that maybe you're out of your depth here as a general matter.
Jyaif 5mo ago
Eventually all the domain name purchasing will be done by agents. (Easiest prediction ever)
zuzululu 5mo ago
Yea its just you and did you generate that with AI ? Plenty use Cloudflare to ship and this basically negates the need to automate all the logistics. Not really sure what you are rambling on about, you are just mixing totally unrelated group of tools and services to support your "yeah agentic use of cloudflare is bad: which makes no sense.
abustamam 5mo ago
> I am also not sure who Stripe Atlas for. I am genuinely confused. It is definitely not something a developer will use. Stripe Atlas has actually been around for quite a while, from like 2016. It's a quick start business platform for startups. HN discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11166417 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11166417 So correct in that it's not something intended for developers. It's intended for entrepreneurs (whether or not they are developers)
j45 5mo ago
It might be. It’s already been possible for a very long time to do all these steps via api, using Cloudflare and/or other domain registrars. The manual steps you take is what you do, and the sequencing you learn is critical as it might not be simply from start to finish. It can be simplified as a sequenced bash script using clis across all the services.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
tremon 5mo ago
This is simply Cloudflare seeing the possibility of an infinite stream of income... these APIs are cheap to execute for them but are always tied to billing.
mannanj 5mo ago
So, I have been doing a lot of vibe coding and making projects and got a confident grasp of the AI agent capabilities (primarily a Opus user, Claude code, and have ~10 years of full stack experience). When I recently started a consulting agency, I found myself reaching into Cloudflare and experienced the same bottlenecks they describe. Here's where I can see this helping again, in the future, when I know what I want and I want to quickly provision a quick digital presence: - buy the domain - provision and deploy to the domain, use Cloudflare as my hoster to serve my bundles (already created the site locally and have MCPs configured to handle this) - Give it a budget, my "risk" tolerance amount, of say $50 - if something goes wrong, the ~30mins saved is worth that $50 risk (low chance of problem here) - Yes I'm going to play with this and see if it works out, and if it does, now I can spin up startup websites for small microapps and POCs a bit faster.
23rf 5mo ago
LLms are an incredibly expensive way to learn that most humans are indeed unoriginal. So armed with an LLM.. yeah great things arent coming out are they. But at the same time they can't be displaced on a whim either lol. Capitalists punching the air rn.
snihalani 5mo ago
This is a war against companies where the moat is the UI. Agentic API is the new UI

by _pdp_ 5mo ago

hulitu 5mo ago

> it is a toy and they do not know who and how they will use it. Just like it is usually used: spam and (D)DoS

cromka 5mo ago

> Buying a domain is not something you have to do daily to require any kind of automation. Sorry, but no, you totally miss the fact there are domain farms which buy the dropped domains and then offer them up for sale. Bots now use AI to analyze the domain's value and automate the whole process. To be able to let AI buy it as well likely offers a tremendous amount of time saving.

misnome 5mo ago
Hasn’t all that been automated by people for decades anyway? I guess this, lowers the barrier to entry for this extremely specific niche?
przmk 5mo ago
It offers value to parasites who buy domains and resell them?
- estimator7292 5mo ago
  Cloudflare gets a cut though, so it's valuable. As long as number go up, all good
  - adventured 5mo ago
    Cloudflare operates as an at-cost registrar. They charge wholesale prices for domains. What cut are you talking about?
    - pocksuppet 5mo ago
      They may be wrong on that particular point, but Cloudflare definitely profits from increased crime as it drives increased sales of Cloudflare's security products. There are rumors they even knowingly help protect DDoS botnets because they benefit from there being more DDoS.
2000UltraDeluxe 5mo ago
It's not like there aren't others who sell domains with an API. This doesn't change that much.
fontain 5mo ago
Complete and utter nonsense. Domain registration is already API driven and has been for decades. The most sophisticated domain name investors (or "domain farms") go as far as to own registrars directly so they have instant access to the registries. Nobody involved in domains would use Cloudflare's product because they already have and have had automations for decades. For example, DropCatch (NameBright) own over 1,000 different registrars so that they have over 1,000 direct routes to Verisign's .com registry. GName are a new player in the space, approaching 1,000 registrars. The amount these companies spend on their registrar licensing alone is many millions of dollars[1]. Cloudflare's product adds nothing new to the world of domains. Anyone has been able to go to OpenSRS and sign up as a reseller with API access for over 20 years. [1] The majority of ICANN's registrar revenue comes from just a few companies that own thousands of registrars collectively: https://www.iana.org/assignments/registrar-ids/registrar-ids.xhtml https://www.iana.org/assignments/registrar-ids/registrar-ids... cmd + f "DropCatch" and "GName"
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
Griffinsauce 5mo ago
So actively making the internet worse. Awesome.
dawnerd 5mo ago
And that goes back way further than AI. We were doing some crazy stuff at Demand Media with enom and all their fake content sites.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]

grey-area 5mo ago

Perfect for spammers, scammers and domain squatters, who can now automate their activities even more. Can’t think of any other uses for this given the current state of LLM ‘agents’, though I can’t wait for the next report of something like ‘openclaw registered 1000 domains for me without asking and now cloudflare won’t refund me’.

PunchyHamster 5mo ago
scamming appears to be lone industry where LLMs are truly a 10x revolution
- timacles 5mo ago
  scamming and advertising. Generate hyper personalized ads in any format! Embed them stealthily into virtually any context! I guarantee thats all big tech is thinking about as the future of LLMs. All this coding stuff is merely a good will investment to buy them time until they can implement this
  - tardedmeme 5mo ago
    My former employer is now generating AI video ads tailored to the specific user.
riedel 5mo ago
And cloudflare can actually sell them priority access to pass their bot protection or introduce micropaiments for agents access content. I feel cloudflare is getting a bit scary tbh. It is like your friendly bot net.
- adamas 5mo ago
  I mean, Cloudflare was always kind of scary. They filter the world wide web, literally.
  - 2ndorderthought 5mo ago

compounding_it 5mo ago

> to what end? People making cooking websites, websites for their garden, etc usually have nowhere to go. A web app who is an agent for a customer will then deploy agents in the backend to deploy the website too. Basically what one would do manually, you tell one agent to make another agent do it. Meta agents are where are going it seems.

tdeck 5mo ago
> People making cooking websites, websites for their garden, etc usually have nowhere to go. They've had WYSIWYG website builders since the late 1990s.
- carlosjobim 5mo ago
  They don't have anymore. At least not since Artisteer shut down.
  - tdeck 5mo ago
    What about SquareSpace and the like?
    - carlosjobim 5mo ago
      It's certainly a great and useful tool. But it's a website maker somewhat in the same way that a Facebook page or Instagram account is a website maker. AFAIK you can't make a website on SquareSpace and download it to your computer, edit it locally and move it to a different host, etc. In the past there were actual WYSIWYG editors which let you design your website or CMS theme and then do whatever you wished with it. Artisteer was the pinnacle of this. Then nerds took over with their command lines and Kubernetes. Imagine if one day people decided that making and editing documents in Word was no longer possible, that they had to be hand coded and command line compiled and linted, and not mix tabs and spaces. That's what happened to website publishing. For no reason at all.
      - 5mo ago

terrytys 5mo ago

lol, there are lots of people who aren't developers.

ascorbic 5mo ago

People use agents to deploy sites all the time. Buying a domain is part of that if you want to build a site that's beyond a toy. Allowing agents to do a task isn't just for things you do every day – it's also for things you do rarely and need agents' help. It's not just devs using agents to perform these sort of tasks anymore. Stripe Atlas makes it massively easier for startups to incorporate in Delaware. This is particularly hard for non-US founders. It solves a real problem. I don't think this part will be done by agents though! Disclaimer: I work at Cloudflare but not on this

makeitdouble 5mo ago
Wouldn't it be critical if the agent botched the domain purchase in weird ways ? Short of throwaway sites (spam etc) it's hard to imagine skimping time on this specific, mostly painless part.
- ascorbic 5mo ago
  If the rest of your deployment flow is via the agent, needing to switch over to a different context and open up a browser and login (or create an account) and buy the domain absolutely is a bump in the road.
  - makeitdouble 5mo ago
    [dead]
- barnabee 5mo ago
  People are skimping time in every part. I am watching people who can't code build and deploy dashboards and sites with Claude Code (desktop app - they don't use the CLI), then go cap in hand to developer friends to get it hosted on a domain (rather than some Vercel or whatever URL). Those people absolutely want to risk letting an agent buy and set up the domain. This is not necessarily as blindly stupid as you might think. Many of these people know that this workflow is no good for writing code that does anything serious (i.e. storing data for people, taking payments, etc.) but there are a huge number of projects that are just websites, dashboard, data visualisations, etc. with static content and public APIs (Twitter is awash with them) and domains are cheap. A decent minority of these are even quite cool or interesting. So a lot of people want to put their vibe-coded weekend project behind a nice domain. Why not?

nottorp 5mo ago

It's a sales tool. You can tell Claude to add a new condition to an if and instead it will duplicate the whole if body. They're hoping you'll tell your "agent" to buy a domain and it will buy 30 instead.

lxgr 5mo ago

> Buying a domain is not something you have to do daily to require any kind of automation. Which is arguably unfortunate, as it nudges people towards using centralized services because they simply don't know that they have the option to register one. For example, why not self-host a single-page party invitation site designed by an agent rather than using Facebook or Instagram?

ACCount37 5mo ago
A lot of what enabled Web 1.0 was how easy it was for an average web user to create his own website. An average web user got far less technical since, and making a website got harder instead. Now, if anyone could just ask an AI agent to set up a website, and get a personal page with an e-mail inbox and a domain - all reasonably secure, TLS set up, billing added as +$5 per year to the AI subscription bundle? Maybe that would help some.
- lxgr 5mo ago
  Yes, this is exactly my hope too. Many hacker/cypherpunk ideas failed or never reached wide adoption because they were just too complicated for regular people: GPG/web of trust, self-hosting websites and email, having your own custom software for personal tasks… Instead, everybody ended up using Gmail, iMessage/WhatsApp, and Facebook, and things are as centralized as they can be. Agents could be a force in breaking that trend. Even if inference stays centralized, the artifacts agents create would not be. Basically the difference between everybody renting from one of a handful apartment building mega corps or being able to hire contractors to build your own things according to your ideas. And just like there, it’ll probably help a lot to know a bit about how the sausage is made to not be taken advantage of. Also, many people will probably always continue to rent, which is fine. But the possibility of agent competition alone will hopefully keep centralized platforms and SaaS offerings on their toes, which is good for their users.
  - disiplus 5mo ago
    The problem is not website, the problem is discovery and discovery is on Instagram, TikTok, and social networks. You don't have any incentive to build a website for a regular audience. What you might do is build an audience on a social network and then try to move them to a website. But at that point you're big enough to build it properly.

Eufrat 5mo ago

> It is cool feature but to what end? Doesn’t this sum up most of the AI “innovations” we’ve seen shoveled in this bubble? We constantly see AI thought leaders backpeddling on promises and just spouting general nonsense. Altman originally talked effusively about an era of “abundance”. An abundance of what? It’s a word salad of feel good vibes without any substance. Sam Altman has gone from claiming AI might cure cancer to shoveling ads and the scope of AI seems to be reduced to mostly be suitable as flawed, imperfect, but mildly useful coding/automation agents that are likely subsidized beyond economic viability, but you can’t point that out because it’s the future!

mpeg 5mo ago

I think this post needs to be put in context, for months now Cloudflare has been releasing products that allow their whole platform to be usable by agents with the main objective of enabling their customers to dynamically write code using Cloudflare, this is just another step. For example, you can now with Artifacts and Dynamic Workers make a lovable-style SaaS where your customers ask the AI agent to write software for them, the agent can run it in sandboxes with no build step, it can version it with a git-compatible API, and now you can even have it buy a domain for the end customer or set up their own cloudflare account when they want to move to production. I personally have no use case for creating domains via agents, but some of the other features they're releasing around this area are extremely useful and I've started to ship internal tools for my clients where they are used, like giving them their own mini claude code that only does one thing – one I shipped last week was an agentic interface for Salesforce reports that understands their domain better (and all the undocumented tech debt) than the built-in Salesforce AI does and therefore manages the context better

7thpower 5mo ago
Keep going…
- mpeg 5mo ago
  Huh? Haha I swear I’m not a sockpuppet or getting paid by cloudflare (I wish!) I just like their products
  - 7thpower 5mo ago
    No I am genuinely curious :)
    - mpeg 5mo ago
      On the tooling I've made? Feel free to ask here or via email, the Salesforce one was for a fairly large (50k+ employees) company that uses it very extensively but as it often happens they're stuck with a ton of legacy crap. They have some of the AI tooling from SFDC but barely use it (lack of training, or interest) so this solves their immediate problem. I'm very keen to use their new dynamic workflows (cf's durable execution engine) which would let agents write workflow steps, that way my users can ask an agent to do stuff like "run this report daily and email it to me" and it can work with minimal setup (very basic example, but you get the idea)

huijzer 5mo ago

My biggest hesitation with these things is that there is no limit to the possible bill I may receive when the agent goes haywire. Cloudflare doesn’t see this as a problem of course.

philipallstar 5mo ago
It's not Cloudflare's job to see what you choose to buy as a problem.
- brazzy 5mo ago
  I'd assume they want to limit the number of bills that will get disputed.
input_sh 5mo ago
There's a whole payment section in the submitted article which addresses your concern, perhaps you should read it.

frevib 5mo ago

> I've have personally never seen a good example where a cross vendor account provisioning actually working. At enterprise level, account provisioning with SCIM is the industry standard.

barnabee 5mo ago

A lot of good and interesting things started out as toys We should build more toys

jeremyjh 5mo ago
I don't think there are a lot in the SAAS world. Usually when something quirky and new launches, readers on this website can discern something about useful intent. Arguably Github, Slack, Twitch, TikTok were basically toys at launch with a lot of people questioning possible market fit. But there is a difference between those products - and for example - everything that came out of the crypto blockchain scene. This new product by Cloudflare feels more in the latter camp than the former.
- fragmede 5mo ago
  Slack, of course, came out of a video game company pivot. Dropbox is famous here because of that one take. The need to allow very intelligent people to be whimsical is maybe best captured by Richard Feynman spinning dinner plates at the cafeteria, which would later lead him to a Nobel Prize for it.

aniviacat 5mo ago

I assume the constructive use case is some non-techy person asking ChatGPT. > Hey, please make me a website about my dog woofy. Give it the link myfluffywoofy.dog ;) Thank you!

nailer 5mo ago

> Buying a domain is not something you have to do daily to require any kind of automation I wrote a python client for dnsimple nearly 16 years ago to exactly that. If you can’t think of a reason it’s useful, you may wish to get your agent to buy a domain for some project you have asked to create.

NikolaosC 5mo ago

[dead]

zsoltkacsandi 5mo ago

> The reason this blog post does not come with any concrete examples how to use this enablement for useful and constructive things tells you something very important - it is a toy and they do not know who and how they will use it. Every time I come across AI projects and AI integrations (including my previous job where I full-time worked on one), no one was able to show me concrete examples how can I use it for constructive things.

nerdsniper 5mo ago

> I am also not sure who Stripe Atlas for. It's for founders who don't have lawyers. My co-founder and I are both developers, we used Stripe Atlas to incorporate a C-Corp due to expecting to fundraise <1 year after incorporation. Stripe Atlas generates about 200 pages of legal boilerplate documents with very sane defaults so that your corporate structure, bylaws, IP protections, director indemnity, etc. align well with investor expectations. It helps investors not have to "rules-lawyer" all your corporate records during due-diligence, because their content exactly matches YC's expectations. ------- I said we made a C-Corp but other founders should default to LLC, which Stripe Atlas can also streamline. An LLC is superior to C-Corp in pretty much every way for any pre-raise founders who don't have an extra $2,000 to >$10,000/year they're willing to part with for higher franchise taxes, "foreign" (different state) corporation registration, CPA's, and additionally lawyers if any investments aren't YC SAFE's (e.g. not YC, Neo, or A16Z SpeedRun). Also note that for pre-revenue C-Corps, Delaware franchise taxes are scaled against number of shares, not company revenue or # of employees, so you can save some money by forming your company with 1,000,000 shares and then file a "Unanimous action of the board of directors" to increase it to 10,000,000 just before angel/pre-seed/seed round, and potentially save a few hundred dollars on your first year franchise taxes, depending on when you incorporate and raise. But if a few hundred dollars makes a difference to you, incorporating as an LLC instead of a C-Corp is the only defensible decision. And as always, start your taxes 3-4 months before they're due. If you want a CPA to do them (which you should if you have any revenue), you'll need to retain them way ahead of time for C-Corps. If you're filling tax forms out yourself, you'll want to start at least a month before they're due.

weird-eye-issue 5mo ago
Yes unless you have a very very very good reason it's always best to just file a basic LLC in the state you are a resident of. Only costs a few hundred dollars at most and doesn't really complicate taxes
- loeber 5mo ago
  This is totally false, sorry. Delaware entities are the standard. Delaware corporate law is better understood than any other by a long shot. Dealing with a random non-Delaware LLC is usually a hint that your counterparty is a rube.

konschubert 5mo ago

I’m not saying that you’re wrong. But it’s worth noting that any good technology starts off being called a toy and with most people not being able to imagine its usefulness.

rrr_oh_man 5mo ago
Yeah, like blockchain. (Sorry for the snark, I'm hangry)
- tardedmeme 5mo ago
  And metaverse.
bjacobel 5mo ago
There are also a lot of bad technologies that start off being called a toy and then just die. Many more, I'd wager.

dizhn 5mo ago

This when their web GUI only allows buying one domain name at a time.

rco8786 5mo ago

> I am also not sure who Stripe Atlas for. This was such a weird mention to see in the article. Stripe Atlas is a service that helps new businesses incorporate and onboard onto Stripe/partner services with some startup credits. It's been around forever, has nothing to do with AI, and is generally a very well-respected service.

21asdffdsa12 5mo ago

It makes deployment for stuff easier for felix and co.. https://x.com/Etherealize_io/status/2042284300029345910 https://x.com/Etherealize_io/status/2042284300029345910

2ndorderthought 5mo ago

I am curious. Say, cloudflare let's Mr doofus run 4 agents from AI provider X. Those agents go on to create a pyramid scheme, prompted or not(both cases are interesting to me). The agents are running code in infrastructure owned by a third party cloud provider. The law catches up with the bots many years later after people lose a couple million. Who is at fault? I think cloudflare is in the clear. Mr doofus could argue that the AI company allowed or enabled the crime which they otherwise wouldn't have done. Or Mr doofus could claim his prompts shouldn't have lead to that outcome and that wasn't his intent at all. Making the bots at fault, but not the AI company I guess?

lxgr 5mo ago

> I've have personally never seen a good example where a cross vendor account provisioning actually working. That's not what this is though, is it? In other words, isn't the (anti-)pattern you describe an argument in favor of agents setting up your accounts instead? You can tell your agent to buy the domain at registrar x, manage DNS at y (and maybe configure DDoS protection and CDN), and host your content at z, and if the agent is good enough, you don't even need to understand the details. You end up with individual credentials for each service, rather than a web of account relationships managed by a single "portal" SaaS.

deadbabe 5mo ago

Typical engineer thinking. If you want an end to end automation solution, you have to automate everything, not just high frequency tasks. It’s not acceptable to just say “oh you can automatically deploy a new site but first you have to register an account and buy a little domain”. The user command is “deploy site, right NOW”.

brightball 5mo ago

I remember back in the day Heroku had a huge store of integrations that you could just turn on with a click and they worked like that. You'd get a New Relic account that was tailored to dyno performance and you accessed it via your Heroku dashboard. It became "the way" a lot of these PaaS systems operated and I'm sure the goal was to get some percentage once you increased your usage from the free tier, which makes sense for the PaaS partner.

xp84 5mo ago
> I'm sure the goal was to get some percentage For sure, revshare is standard on those partnerships. Fun(ny) fact: all the companies that started out on Heroku back then are still locked into those Heroku-captive tenant accounts on those partners, because contractually, the partner is not allowed to transition such an account to direct billing. One company I've worked with has had all their infra moved off Heroku for almost a decade, but their Sendgrid account, which has hundreds of subtenants that each have custom domains configured, still can only be logged into via Heroku. They'd have to rebuild that whole thing from scratch (including make all their customers redo DNS validation) to move to a real sendgrid account. I'm sure Heroku earns Salesforce a really healthy revenue stream based on this.

giancarlostoro 5mo ago

> The reason this blog post does not come with any concrete examples how to use this enablement for useful and constructive things tells you something very important - it is a toy and they do not know who and how they will use it. I've been wondering the same thing. What would have stopped me from using a model to talk to their APIs in an autonomous way anyway? Are you going to captcha my bot from running scripts to hit your API end-points? How can you tell its not my automated scripts vs an agent vs me testing?

smrtinsert 5mo ago

I'm probably very out of date here, but I thought domains weren't allowed to be purchased programmatically due to misuse, crime, fraud etc. Why is it allowed now just because of agents? This is bonkers to me.

zaidf 5mo ago

An entire generation of non developers are being onboarded to products built for developers because of AI. Exampl: a very non technical friend has built a bunch of business automations with Claude and a few days ago he just dropped in the conversation that he is using Cloudflare. “For what?” I asked because usually Claude will recommend Cercel before Cloudflare. But in this case, it recommended Cloudflare because of the Tunnels feature. Now he is using it for a lot more than Tunnels. Mostly just lets Claude use it whenever it makes sense. “To what end?” was the default reaction when Amazon launched S3 in mid 2000s :)

zeroq 5mo ago

It's not about concrete examples. Seasoned, well trained engineers have created hundreds of thousands in billing on AWS through a simple mistakes overnight. It's immediately reminds me of putting microtransactions into children games on mobile devices - a venue that has been thoroughly explored some 10-15 years ago. I can't see payment and provisioning as a blocker in any scenario. This has a potential to create a massive yet very dubious income stream for the company.

loeber 5mo ago

Downvoted. Stripe Atlas is a massively successful service that handles 100K+ incorporations annually. It's a key piece of Stripe's ecosystem support. You writing that you're "not sure who it's for" suggests to me that maybe you're out of your depth here as a general matter.

Jyaif 5mo ago

Eventually all the domain name purchasing will be done by agents. (Easiest prediction ever)

zuzululu 5mo ago

Yea its just you and did you generate that with AI ? Plenty use Cloudflare to ship and this basically negates the need to automate all the logistics. Not really sure what you are rambling on about, you are just mixing totally unrelated group of tools and services to support your "yeah agentic use of cloudflare is bad: which makes no sense.

abustamam 5mo ago

> I am also not sure who Stripe Atlas for. I am genuinely confused. It is definitely not something a developer will use. Stripe Atlas has actually been around for quite a while, from like 2016. It's a quick start business platform for startups. HN discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11166417 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11166417 So correct in that it's not something intended for developers. It's intended for entrepreneurs (whether or not they are developers)

j45 5mo ago

It might be. It’s already been possible for a very long time to do all these steps via api, using Cloudflare and/or other domain registrars. The manual steps you take is what you do, and the sequencing you learn is critical as it might not be simply from start to finish. It can be simplified as a sequenced bash script using clis across all the services.

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

tremon 5mo ago

This is simply Cloudflare seeing the possibility of an infinite stream of income... these APIs are cheap to execute for them but are always tied to billing.

mannanj 5mo ago

So, I have been doing a lot of vibe coding and making projects and got a confident grasp of the AI agent capabilities (primarily a Opus user, Claude code, and have ~10 years of full stack experience). When I recently started a consulting agency, I found myself reaching into Cloudflare and experienced the same bottlenecks they describe. Here's where I can see this helping again, in the future, when I know what I want and I want to quickly provision a quick digital presence: - buy the domain - provision and deploy to the domain, use Cloudflare as my hoster to serve my bundles (already created the site locally and have MCPs configured to handle this) - Give it a budget, my "risk" tolerance amount, of say $50 - if something goes wrong, the ~30mins saved is worth that $50 risk (low chance of problem here) - Yes I'm going to play with this and see if it works out, and if it does, now I can spin up startup websites for small microapps and POCs a bit faster.

23rf 5mo ago

LLms are an incredibly expensive way to learn that most humans are indeed unoriginal. So armed with an LLM.. yeah great things arent coming out are they. But at the same time they can't be displaced on a whim either lol. Capitalists punching the air rn.

snihalani 5mo ago

This is a war against companies where the moat is the UI. Agentic API is the new UI