13 ms·

Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work

668 points by speckx 3mo ago

nthypes 3mo ago
I really don't know how folks accept such vendor lock-in. Imagine using Cloudflare Workers as your main tech stack. This is crazy.
wenbin 3mo ago
They had a demo https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49101234 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49101234
- britannio 3mo ago
  timestamp is 47:45
veunes 3mo ago
[flagged]
thehamkercat 3mo ago
Why are companies slapping "OS" in their product naming? it's stupid
- Havoc 3mo ago
  Cause they’re trying to build an ecosystem
- NetOpWibby 3mo ago
  From the GitHub page: This is not a traditional computer operating system. We use the term "operating system" in two senses: - An operating system for the company to be productive with AI, in a way that is safe, so that the security team can sleep at night. - An operating system for AI workloads, analogous to the sense in which a traditional operating system manages compute workloads.
  - alt227 3mo ago
    It looks to me like they just wanted to distinguish their product from other AI agents/sandboxes, so they called it an OS to make it sound bigger and better.
    - wuliwong 3mo ago
      Nah, it's just the current lingo in the AI world. Another one they will use is "brain." As far as I can tell "brain" and "OS" are interchangeable. :(
  - orphea 3mo ago
    It's awful naming if they have to explain it.
  - brazukadev 3mo ago
    the people criticizing the vibecoded name knows what they meant, it is just not correct. It is the same as vegan meat.
    - aziaziazi 3mo ago
      Excluding vegetables from what convey “meat” was also not correct around 1300-1500. Definitions changes with usage and only time will tell the future of vegan steaks, meats, milks, sauvages, butters and other parties. > food, nourishment, sustenance > Narrower sense of "flesh of warm-blooded animals killed and used as food" is attested from c. 1300 https://www.etymonline.com/word/meat https://www.etymonline.com/word/meat
  - arandomhuman 3mo ago
    Wow this is really poor justification for its name, the folks at cloudflare really should not be overloading the term "Operating System" pointlessly like this.
    - MattyRad 3mo ago
      They even put it in quotes, because they know what they did. Maybe just take out the word "traditional" and be honest: "This is not an operating system. We're redefining the term because it is convenient for marketing."
- radlad 3mo ago
  I think because the idea of an "agent operating system" is starting to feel more and more inevitable. Since I can use AI to: - Pull information from external sources - Transform and/or augment that information - Publish information I almost do not need a traditional OS anymore. This obviously isn't entirely true: I still use it to interact directly with humans, and it's the way I access my LLM. For now.
  - tkel 3mo ago
    Does your LLM have hardware drivers in it? this is silly.
    - alt227 3mo ago
      Agreed, its like OSes have become so invisible people have actually forgotten what they do.
    - jryle70 3mo ago
      But "virtual machine" is not? Maybe "Virtual OS" is more acceptable?
    - arandomhuman 3mo ago
      This is really approaching peak AI psychosis
    - radlad 3mo ago
      I'm obviously not saying that LLMs replace the glue between hardware and software. That would be absurd. An operating system is just the interface a user has to the programs they run on their computer. Surely you can imagine a world where you boot into a ChatGPT-like interface instead of the desktop OS you are familiar with? Different computing paradigms already exist: mobile OS sure, but also ChromeOS... heck, install Arch Linux and you're dropped into a shell by default - not a GUI. How is this so different? And it doesn't even have to replace your existing OS to be your operating system: If you purchase a cloud VM (say from AWS or DigitalOcean), you're likely running an operating system on top of another operating system already.
- mrcwinn 3mo ago
  [flagged]
  - thomastjeffery 3mo ago
    I disagree. Harness is a pretty great word, and it doesn't already have another familiar meaning.
- shostack 3mo ago
  Because AI enables a new layer more akin to an actual OS. But also because I imagine they all want all the things running through them and an OS is the widest net they can cast in that direction.
- orsorna 3mo ago
  Same reason why grifters adopted web3 when Web 3.0 was already an established term.
- ikania2026 3mo ago
  i too clicked the link by this exactly 2 characters, "OS" should NOT be used in this way.
- bearjaws 3mo ago
  [flagged]
- ignoramous 3mo ago
  Andy Jassy et al didn't quite name it that, but AWS was being thought of internally as "Internet OS".
  - lern_too_spel 3mo ago
    AWS as an OS also makes sense to me. An OS abstracts the underlying hardware, so the user doesn't have to worry about other users of that hardware if they don't want to and restrict interaction with other user programs in ways that protect those other programs. This is different from OS-less embedded programming, which does have device driver libraries but does not have an OS. People here seem to have a completely wrong idea of what an OS is and are really adamant about it.
- 1bpp 3mo ago
  Because it sounds impressive to clueless people ($).
- dwroberts 3mo ago
  I agree, it has now become a cliche buzzword that product managers slap on boring non-technical things to make them sound important. Isn’t there even a bug tracker that some company calls an ‘issue OS’ or something absurd?
- kentonv 3mo ago
  Mostly to get trolls to retweet and complain about it for free advertising. It's working. ;)
  - ncr100 3mo ago
    Is this a public-relations policy at Cloudflare?
- sixdimensional 3mo ago
  You're missing the subtle marketecture trick here they are doing.. Non-technical people don't always think of an OS as the computer OS. To them, sometimes it means more like standard operating procedure or process - a standard way of doing things. Secondly, for tech products, calling yourself an OS, you are associating yourself with things like Windows, Mac or Linux. You are indirectly trying to grandstand and position yourself as meaningful enough to be an "OS" when clearly, that is far from what an app layer + AI/LLM on top of a real OS is. The biggest giveaway is this, and I'm exposing it right here -from a technical perspective, what operating system computer technology was built from scratch from first principles around AI/LLM? Someone wants to be the first company to get huge sums of money/funding to be that startup/project, so that is also a positioning tactic. The issue is of course, most people are standing on the shoulders of giants at this point... and OS has this conflicted meaning with nontechnical users also about work process vs the software that runs my computer.
  - fl4regun 3mo ago
    >you are associating yourself with things like Windows, Mac or Linux But this is nothing like those things.
    - sixdimensional 3mo ago
      Yes - I agree - that is what I am trying to say in fact. But the association gets made because of the naming. The only dictionary definition of "operating system" I see is like the technical one on Wikipedia [1], which IS more like Windows, Mac or Linux.. not like an app or platform. From my concise Oxford English Dictionary, for example.. "operating system, n. the low-level software that supports a computer's basic functions". Like, would it be better if it was just called the "Cloudflare App"? Or the "Cloudflare App Platform"? or the "Cloudflare Platform App"? Those aren't clear winners either, they could easily be confused for product offerings or other things. They could name it, like, "Cloudflare Rocket" (random product name) or "Cloudflare Jane" (e.g. personality) and then say, "this is the desktop app for Cloudflare Jane, which is a platform where we put all these tools and capabilities that combine with agentic powers".. but then it wouldn't have the marketing flair either. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_system
- pizzafeelsright 3mo ago
  People do not use an 'OS' anymore. Anything internet is a hundred pieces of hardware over 1000 kilometers apart providing an interface to an application with a KVM (for now)
- clhodapp 3mo ago
  Marketing types have started subbing in "Operating System" for "Platform" lately. And, because it feels bold and fresh to them, they often name whole product an "OS" when they do this in order to make anyone who talks about the product re-sell the pitch for them.
- neop1x 3mo ago
  It's such a bad decision. It just creates more confusion.
palata 3mo ago
I am confused... it's not an OS, is it?
- thrownaway561 3mo ago
  https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflare-os#cloudflare-os-an-ai-productivity-environment https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflare-os#cloudflare-os-an... This is not a traditional computer operating system. We use the term "operating system" in two senses: An operating system for the company to be productive with AI, in a way that is safe, so that the security team can sleep at night. An operating system for AI workloads, analogous to the sense in which a traditional operating system manages compute workloads.
  - sethops1 3mo ago
    > We use the term "operating system" incorrectly. FTF[them]
  - alt227 3mo ago
    > An operating system for AI workloads, analogous to the sense in which a traditional operating system manages compute workloads. They have really twisted the definition to fit their marketing here. Operating systems are what allow you to use hardware to interact with software. Their product does nothing comparable to that at all.
  - philipwhiuk 3mo ago
    They still use the term in the “definitions” so they aren’t actually defining anything
rozenmd 3mo ago
I liked Kenton's take on this: https://x.com/KentonVarda/status/2084990137180590572?s=20 https://x.com/KentonVarda/status/2084990137180590572?s=20 Text from tweet: Today we are releasing Cloudflare OS, a chatbot with connectors, just like every other tech company is doing. Except actually, it's different. This is a remake of Sandstorm[.]io, my startup from 10 years ago, except this time built on Cloudflare Workers (the platform I've spent the last 9 years building) and deeply leveraging AI. This is more or less the culmination of my secret 10-year master plan. This is a full-on personal app vibe coding platform, in which the sandbox is so secure that you can pretty much go wild -- the AI cannot introduce a significant security bug. We believe a company's security team can feel comfortable giving non-technical users permission to vibe code and then sleep soundly at night. How is that possible? It's the Sandstorm security model, revisited. A "Gadget" is the same thing as a Sandstorm "Grain": a fine-grained app instance. For example, if you have a document editor app, each document runs as a separate instance of the app, in a separate sandbox (one "Gadget"). This means two things, both of which I think are Big Deals: 1. The platform can manage all access control, by controlling who can access the Gadget at all. There is no way the Gadget can accidentally leak itself to an attacker -- even an attacker who has access to other Gadgets based on the same app. 2. Since everyone is running their own copy of the code, everyone can freely modify their copy of the code. Think about #2 a bit more. What if, when you wanted a new feature in the software you are using, you could just prompt your agent to add it? This doesn't work in the cloud Software-as-a-Service model, because you are not running your own copy of the app. Sandstorm tried to change that 10 years ago, but the world wasn't ready, because not enough people had the skills or patience to actually modify their software. AI has changed that. Now you just ask the agent -- the same agent that you are using to help you interact with the Gadget can also modify the code of the Gadget. And it is so fun.
- NetOpWibby 3mo ago
  Damn, this is a pretty big deal!
  - BonerWiener 3mo ago
    Can you explain why you think this is a big deal? What particular feature/capability made you think this? I do not disagree but i am curios. Lets have a discussion instead of just throwing feel good vibes around...
rvz 3mo ago
From: https://os.cloudflare.app/ https://os.cloudflare.app/ > "Give every person an agent and workspace built around how your company works, what it knows, and the systems it relies on." Hundreds of thousands of so called "AI startups" have been eliminated.
- vehemenz 3mo ago
  Or they can just transition to Cloudflare OS and keep their domain-specific data proprietary, which is where the money is in the first place.
wxw 3mo ago
This is effectively a Codex/Claude app competitor. Good move from Cloudflare since it helps them sell their core infra offerings. I like the direction they’re going with access control.
- alansaber 3mo ago
  Yep, a pre-wrapped Codex for enterprise. Seems like the logical evolution from setting up an MCP.
  - mrcwinn 3mo ago
    Codex for enterprise is Codex for enterprise.
- bearjaws 3mo ago
  The real question is, can Cloudflare become a equal or better OpenAI / Claude provider, while offering a vastly more robust platform than either? I think the answer is yes, simply because both OAI and Anthropic leverage CF for their hosting today. I used to meme back in 2008 (when Google docs first was becoming big) that "The problem has always been the sandbox". The problem Chrome and Firefox solved was the Sandbox - you can browse some random code across the web without worrying about getting hacked. The same problem has arisen today but now with AI agents. There is likely to be huge winners in the AI space simply based on who can create the best way to contain AI agents and "expose AI value" safely.
- dgellow 3mo ago
  So, that means even more pressure on OpenAI and Anthropic. I really don’t see how they will stay competitive long term. Cloudflare can offers way better product by integrating with the rest of their platform and offering a variety of models, including open models they host themselves
alansaber 3mo ago
So, a security-oriented cloud agent framework? Better call it an OS.
iamniels 3mo ago
This is close to what I need for my company. Currently I'm test driving Open WebUI. https://github.com/open-webui/open-webui https://github.com/open-webui/open-webui
- bezko 3mo ago
  Stay away, I had bad experience myself, I'm sure there is something better out there. For me I ended up asking Claude to build a custom RAG pipeline, took an afternoon and is 10x faster.
Lwrless 3mo ago
[dead]
vehemenz 3mo ago
> Cloudflare OS is available today and is open source. Check out the cloudflare-os GitHub repository. You can deploy it into your own Cloudflare account and use your own Access policies, AI Gateway configuration, data, and integrations. In case anybody missed it.
- hobofan 3mo ago
  It's open source, but it is so incredibly tied to their platform, that there is no vendor portability, which has made almost every of their product launches post-Workers kind of meh.
  - CrimsonRain 3mo ago
    workerd is OSS
zsoltkacsandi 3mo ago
Seemingly Cloudflare’s strategy nowadays is shipping “open-source” projects that are coupled with their own infastructure. First EmDash CMS, now this.
- 9cb14c1ec0 3mo ago
  Not a bad marketing strategy. Vendor lock in matters a lot less to some people than it does to me.
- arm32 3mo ago
  OH! I get it. OS = "open source"!
yomismoaqui 3mo ago
Everytime I read about new things from Cloudflare they look really cool but I cannot shake the feeling of not wanting to use them for fear of lock-in, am I too paranoid?
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- doublerabbit 3mo ago
  Cloudflare is just another corporation with greed in their eyes and if you don't design yourself to their puzzle than you're not welcomed. This is an extra wall in walled garden land; another one you will need to jump if you want to break free. Another stab at gatekeeping the upcoming Ai era of the internet. It's no different to the playbook of Google, Apple, and Facebook of the 00's. So, no, you're not paranoid. In the terms of security: My firefox on FreeBSD instantly triggers endless loops of "prove your human" on their turnstile. I can't use old handhelds of android and a single VPN triggers all. Anything that they don't see as "secure" you're denied from. What is stopping Cloudflare from deeming your LLM as unsafe? Scenario: You're ready to launch, you come up with the next best innovation for the next generation of Ai internet. Revolutionary and you're about to launch, blast off; wait. You're denied your launch because it threatens their service. The former: they like your idea more-so and clone it to become theirs. Stories of above have all been posted on HN before. Startups have been sabotaged by rug-pulling of cloud providers. It is early-vendor lock-in and at it's best. Google & Co would be jealous; if they were not in bed with. This will turn in to a netting of: Your Ai isn't using our service, so your Ai isn't allowed to interact with ours. What does Cloudflare offer as a service? A turnstile to the Internet of Things and the difference this time is that you get to self-host your own corner on their patch of land with their ticket prices and access policy of. Remember folks, no corporation gives a rat's ass about you. Internally, or externally, you're just another sheep to extract wool from.
- Lucasoato 3mo ago
  No, you’re not too paranoid. It has already proven both in the software and hardware world what vendor lock-in can lead to. Also check out Bunny.net.
- 3mo ago
fnoef 3mo ago
"OS for work" - like, what does it mean? OS is operating system, it runs on a hardware and provides you to operate the system. I hate when companies destroy the English language with vibe invented terms.
- Kudos 3mo ago
  If this succeeds, it's going to be in spite of its branding and marketing.
- lern_too_spel 3mo ago
  An operating system manages access to shared hardware (disk, CPU, memory, networking, display, etc. on a single machine OS). MS-DOS mainly handled shared access to disk via a file system abstraction, hence the name. The naming of Cloudflare OS makes sense to me.
  - hashstring 3mo ago
    It doesn’t schedule tasks, doesn’t deal with physical memory, it doesn’t initialize hardware or interface with it on a low level. This is just an app that lives in user-space, nothing more. Calling this an OS is like calling Gmail an OS. It doesn’t make any sense. But since OSes are notoriously difficult to define [1], half of America added AI slop to diets that were already repulsive to begin with, regurgitates the chyme, and passionately feeds it to their peers, you may even get away with it nowadays. [1] https://os.ecci.ucr.ac.cr/slides/Andrew-S.-Tanenbaum-Modern-Operating-Systems.pdf https://os.ecci.ucr.ac.cr/slides/Andrew-S.-Tanenbaum-Modern-...
    - sintax 3mo ago
      Counter point: emacs :)
    - kentonv 3mo ago
      > It doesn’t schedule tasks, It absolutely does. > doesn’t deal with physical memory, Well it sort of does. It allocates sandboxes and schedules apps in them. It handles loading code from storage and turning it into running programs with state. > it doesn’t initialize hardware or interface with it on a low level. Instead of devices it manages interfacing with external services (Gatekeepers are like drivers). I didn't choose the name but I do think there's a fair analogy here even on a technical level.
badlibrarian 3mo ago
This represents a small part of what IT is worried about. Offer a beer and say the word "SharePoint" if you want the long version of where this could wind up. The issue isn't letting end-users add features. The issue is twelve end-users customizing something that produces output, saving it, and now nobody can read it. This can get solved. If it even gets a chance to gain traction (it should, though IT will of course push back). But let's not pretend we're there yet.
pjmlp 3mo ago
Ah look, yet another one jumping into AI party.
- ocdtrekkie 3mo ago
  This is the middle of Cloudflare's "Agents Week"... and I believe they had an Agents Week last year. We're like... at least a year or two into Cloudflare being in the AI party. ;)
  - pjmlp 3mo ago
    Well, one needs to keep surviving the hype wave, not that other surfers overtake it.
pelagicAustral 3mo ago
Probably better if they make it obvious that you need Workers paid plan: "Your Cloudflare account is on the Free plan, but the Cloudflare OS backend needs Dynamic Workers, which requires the Workers Paid plan."
- elicash 3mo ago
  This is just if you don't want to host it yourself, no?
  - pelagicAustral 3mo ago
    Far as I can tell, even if you host it yourself you are still bound to their workers.
    - orakmoya 3mo ago
      which are open sourced [1]. I tried deploying it and had Deepseek v4 Flash create a dumb whiteboarding app. [1] https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
4lx87 3mo ago
Engineers should be wary about being forced into using particular prompts/skills/instructions. Why would I use a shared LLM-in-the-cloud, instead of my own? The shared one precludes any possibility to customize or differentiate my workflow, prompts, or skills. As an employee that sounds like a death sentence to doing my job effectively.
- kentonv 3mo ago
  That's why this is open source. https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflare-os https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflare-os You're supposed to customize it. Also it features a whole system for adding your own skills and context.
prathje 3mo ago
Setting up your public URLRetrying… (attempt 5 of 6) Fingers crossed!! The last one gotta be the one... EDIT: It let me down... (Something unexpected went wrong on our side.) Please let me now if deploying it on your custom domain worked for you please... EDIT: Retrying it now worked but I had to subscribe to R2 (which is free for 10GB apparently). However, after that it will tell you that you need to enable the Dynamic Workers which is actually paid... "Your Cloudflare account is on the Free plan, but the Cloudflare OS backend needs Dynamic Workers, which requires the Workers Paid plan." So no free preview for me today.
hmokiguess 3mo ago
I can't help but wonder if these things that are now emerging have a sort of "borrowed time" component tied to them. I see the examples, and they clearly tackle both organizational inefficiencies and human connection/communication as the core problems. Sounds like things are converging to "my AI will talk to your AI" and the role of humans will just be a human "router" in the loop switching up nodes in a graph, like the return of Switchboard Operators from the 1950s.
asdev 3mo ago
Everyone is building these same looking apps that look like Codex, Claude desktop. We don't need these. Slackbots work more than well enough to collaborate with agents.
q8zd3 3mo ago
Why do people add "OS" to their product/project name when it is not an OS at all?
- reallyreason 3mo ago
  Indeed, at this point it's one of the most devalued terms in software. Every week I'm reading about some product calling itself "the Operating System for XYZ." It seems like it's what you do when "platform" just feels too modest. To me, if it's not bootable, calling your product an OS just reeks of marketing sleight of hand.
- spencerflem 3mo ago
  In some sense, it is. Sandstorm called itself an OS too. Arcan calls itself an Overlay-OS. I think for any platform for general purpose computing that provides an application model that programs are written to target, it's close enough I don't mind. Ie: it makes sense for some end-user software to have a target for Windows, Linux, Sandstorm, etc. & from the other side- what does Debian add that lets it call itself an OS? A set environment and package manager that software is specifically packaged for.
  - q8zd3 3mo ago
    I see a Linux distro as a "integration project", which delivers several software pieces glued together that work in harmony, which includes "OS pieces" such as the Linux kernel.
- palata 3mo ago
  Because "The Android of ..." is out of fashion?
isodev 3mo ago
Wait, isn’t that what Mistral does for their Vibe interface for companies?
wasabi359 3mo ago
[flagged]
xgulfie 3mo ago
gas town 2 real???
sreekanth850 3mo ago
how this can be compared against Microsoft agent framework?
therepanic 3mo ago
Why?
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
yewenjie 3mo ago
Has anyone experienced using Buzz or YC's qm? How does this compare with those?
s20n 3mo ago
Finally, we have an "OS" written in typescript. And here I was thinking that an OS would be the only exception to Atwood's law /s
tonetheman 3mo ago
[dead]
luciana1u 3mo ago
[flagged]
dukeofdoom 3mo ago
How do you install this? Where's the download link.
- arm32 3mo ago
  It's an operating system, so perhaps you need the ISO...
- kentonv 3mo ago
  https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflare-os https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflare-os
agentdev001 3mo ago
Im having a hard time figuring out what the intended user interface is here. The screenshots im seeing makes this look to be an electron app, but the repo seems to be implying that this is a deployed web app. If this is just another librechat I'll be disappointed, and frustrated- because this is so 5 months ago.
giancarlostoro 3mo ago
Really not a fan of calling things an OS that are not an OS. This seems interesting, but it is also tied to CloudFlare workers, so beware.
rightbondsadmin 3mo ago
I'm curious if the primary customer will be developers or IT admins
arm32 3mo ago
If Cloudflare's been using this internally, could that explain why their dashboards are so confused, disjointed and broken?
sciencejerk 3mo ago
But is it actually an OS?
- angry_octet 3mo ago
  Is Chrome?
  - EasyMark 3mo ago
    Does chrome claim to be an OS? or are you talking about chrome os which is an OS built on top of a Linux kernel, kind of like ubuntu or redhat
angry_octet 3mo ago
This is revolutionary stuff. It crystalises latent thoughts I've had about how to safely integrate agentic capability for serious work. We're starting to see indifferently architected AI creep into every engineering tool, from requirements management to coding, MATLAB, EDA and Solidworks. At the same time we see LLMs orchestrating long running hacking campaigns that will leverage other agents and automation to propagate. We really need an architecture that can handle that complexity. Kenton Varda hitting the ball out of the park again.
colinrand 3mo ago
this is a cool idea, but i suspect will be limited in use cases. the vast majority of people don't want or can't modify their software competently and will rely on others to do that. once you're relying on someone else, they do not want to maintain different copies for every user, that sounds like a maintenance nightmare for admins or else such a new paradigm that it takes a new generation of admins 20 years to get comfortable.
moody__ 3mo ago
When did junk like this start being called an operating system?
- p0w3n3d 3mo ago
  The same question is bothering me
jakswa 3mo ago
Seems like a good candidate to replace my home-grown llama.cpp web UI clone. This comment used to be a gripe about their provider UX not giving an example URL (realized /v1 is expected as the final segment).
sschueller 3mo ago
So to run this 'OS', I need to have an existing running OS...
aegisora_ai 3mo ago
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aegisora_ai 3mo ago
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overgard 3mo ago
I'm mostly going off the tweet, it could be I just don't understand, but how do you managed shared data if everyone has their own copy of the code and they can add whatever features they want? I mean, I'm assuming that any sort of significant feature requires some sort of change to the data model, and even with a schema-less database you could have conflicts if two things use the same field name, for instance? Also what happens with updates? Like, part of IT is keeping people up to date, but if everyone has their own bespoke customizations how do you not clobber those? Also the security story doesn't completely add up to me. Like, if I'm a user and I can just add features that I want, what's to stop me from placing data in there that's maybe covered under HIPPA or some other sensitive data (protected class, or even just stuff like authentication information)? Right now a small number of people need to think about data security, but this seems like it'd extend it to anyone? That kind of data, it's not just about "keeping it internal by default", there are a lot of rules around storing it at all. I dunno, it kind of makes me think of when people suggest forking an open source project if the maintainers won't accept a suggestion. Sure, you can do that, and it does happen, but you're also basically signing up to maintain it for decades. I'm not sure if anyone wants to maintain Alice in accounting's very weird spreadsheet app 10 years after she's left the company? (Again I'm not throwing shade, just trying to understand better)
- kentonv 3mo ago
  The key is the fine-grained instances (gadgets). E.g. if you're using a slide editor app, each slide deck you create is its own instance of the app, whose code can be independently modified. The slide content and the code are kept together and sandboxed together. Adding HIPPA data to the app is no different to adding it to the slide content. I suppose whether or not that is OK depends on a lot of things, but the same things apply to traditional PowerPoint. The fact that the code is modifiable doesn't change the situation, since those modifications are sandboxed and constrained to that one slide deck.
  - heybales 3mo ago
    I hope there are no healthcare CEOs reading this and if there are, please, for the love of god, do not let your execs or providers use cloud platforms to create apps with HIPAA data in them unless your lawyer is really bored and you have cash to burn on all the fines and lawsuits. Also don't offload yet another responsibility (i.e software development) to the people trying to take care of patients.
rcarmo 3mo ago
I have a feeling we're all working towards the same thing, but with different frameworks and infra. The Cloudflare OS experience looks, to me, very much like what I created for myself with https://rcarmo.github.io/projects/piclaw https://rcarmo.github.io/projects/piclaw (except that I rely on focusing different instances on different sets of skills and tooling, so only two have "Office" skills, for instance).
eigencoder 3mo ago
I think this is trying to do something similar to exe.dev, but not doing it as well
- chews 3mo ago
  I am an exe customer and happy with the product, but this has support for sockets and grpc. This is a slightly more capable product for various use cases.
mannanj 3mo ago
Does this beat self-stewarding my data, and placing relevant protections around my data instead. Then the UI's, the "Apps", are just ephemeral instances over my live data whose permission I am consistently setting or reviewing. I feel like that more accurately represents a "person" behind the data: when I am producing, creating and expressing in real life, I do not ask some intermediary 3rd-party for permission to access my voice and my output. I just produce and let whatever gets created be made there in the physical environment or in someone's head. Today's apps (edit: & cloudflare's direction here) feel more like "The moment I express or generate something, I lease it's output from someone else and ask for their permission to access my output".
scottydelta 3mo ago
Well everyone is trying to create an environment where they can safely delegate tasks to agents. I am no different, but my approach is a dedicated powerful computer on your desk rather than something in the cloud. I am calling it Tarvis AI (derived from TARS from Interstellar and Jarvis from Iron Man), more details here: https://tarvisai.com https://tarvisai.com I have tried many of the VM/cloud-based agent setups, and they either tend to be only novelties since you can’t do much with 2-4 vCPUs + limited RAM or they start racking up expensive cloud bills. I realized that the underlying operating systems for AI have to be built from the ground up for agents instead of taking current OSes and taming them for agents. Not sure how much of that philosophy is followed by Cloudflare. Excited to see growth in this area.
allenstanlee 3mo ago
I think it is cool!
allenstanlee 3mo ago
I think this is cool!
aarjaneiro 3mo ago
This "OS" label reminds me of ms with ".NET", a choice they definitely seemed to regret
notnmeyer 3mo ago
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deleted 3mo ago
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programd 3mo ago
Also worth reading is the blog post by the Cloudflare CIO Sam Rhea on how they are actually using it internally, with some examples. https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-we-use-ai-with-cloudflare-os/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-we-use-ai-with-cloudflare-os...
jakswa 3mo ago
In case anyone else is curious, local Gemma4 12B Q6 XL really struggles to make use of this for simple goals like a daily briefing after an MCP tool call. I don't think there's a simple artifact concept? Still early but confused.
avoidstupidity 3mo ago
[dead]
- cdolan 3mo ago
  ive been tinkering with this all day. its far more than a chat app. going to change how our team collaborates on work tasks
mcfdoesdev 3mo ago
[flagged]
ninglor 3mo ago
Cool. The gadgets/blueprints paradigm reminds me of Smalltalk or Lisp environments in a way -- you're shipping a messy thing, a packaged version of your own personal, always-evolving environment. Natural language wrapper around programming. Sandboxing and controlling external interactions to minimize the cost of mistakes. As I see it, the core idea here is facilitating habitability (in the Richard P Gabriel sense) via abstracting software development and distribution in a way that allows non-programmers to engage. I'm not sure LLMs are quite there with results/$ to fully support a personal computing revolution here. I suspect useful blueprints will largely be wrappers or reimplementations of software that is still primarily created and distributed outside of this environment. But there's promise here, and it's cool.
dennisy 3mo ago
A question to the other builders in this space: how are you positioning yourself and differentiating against incumbents like this or even Claude Cowork? Are you finding many clients looking at your system and telling you they could prompt Claude directly?
jesse_dot_id 3mo ago
AOS would make more sense for the naming convention here.
arush15june 3mo ago
I just deployed it on my cloudflare workers, it went live in a minute, worked through my CF Access SSO. Wasn't able to configure providers easily. But reading the blog this is wild! I have been driving a hermes agent off a VM in a proxmox from my slack and wondering how to handle security. If this takes off, this is really how enterprise agents should end up looking like. The dynamic workers hosting applications is the AI Appsmith/Retool that I need for internal dashboards.
- indigodaddy 3mo ago
  No luck either with custom providers from the AI Gateway working within CFOS (deployed to my CF account)...
- mlrtime 3mo ago
  Why not deploy cloudflare-os on proxmox?
  - arush15june 3mo ago
    It was just easier to use the deploy button on the repo tbh
  - yaronsh 3mo ago
    We have an alternative for Cloudflare OS running on k8s. Next release is also including external services concept, which is already developed before Cloudflare OS was released. https://github.com/SimaDevelopment/opsiforce https://github.com/SimaDevelopment/opsiforce
seebeen 3mo ago
Oh my god. Who asked for this? Who needs this? Why is everything being enshittified. I can't take this any more srsly.
- britannio 3mo ago
  Notably they have been using it internally since May. This is their v2.
liampulles 3mo ago
We've pivoted pretty hard from infra being cattle, haven't we?
ahriad 3mo ago
They gated it to US providers only, fucking garbage
- kentonv 3mo ago
  Not intentionally, we just haven't gotten around to expanding the provider list beyond what we use regularly. There is ollama (local LLM) support in there. But we'll probably expand it to everything pi-agent-core supports, just need some UI work.
  - ahriad 3mo ago
    I'm talking about setting up one provider for the entire OS not about BYOK per user. Right now only cloudflare AI gateway is supported and in it you hardcoded it to US providers. Plus your AI workers and from your model you only supporting two.
    - kentonv 3mo ago
      The code currently supports Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, Workers AI, and ollama as AI providers. It additionally optionally supports sending all requests through Cloudflare AI Gateway as a proxy. The same set of providers is supported either way, but when you configure AI Gateway, we assume you intend to install side-wide API keys into the gateway. The idea here is that you're setting up the gateway for your entire company, and you want all users to use the same keys. So we no longer let individual users configure their own keys in this mode -- instead they can choose from among the providers you have configured site-wide. We will expand the provider list soon.
      - indigodaddy 3mo ago
        I can't get an AI Gateway custom provider to work within CFOS (deployed to my CF account). No matter what custom model path I use in the cfos admin add provider mechanism, I get a model not found error when attempting to use the model in a conversation...
taw1285 3mo ago
It looks like this product uses pi-agent directly (https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflare-os/blob/main/plans/pi-impl.md https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflare-os/blob/main/plans/...). How come Cloudflare is not using their homegrown Agents SDK / Think / Flue harness for this? I am asking genuinely as I am evaluating a harness to build my agent platform.
- kentonv 3mo ago
  Flue is actually also built on Pi. We are big Pi fans at Cloudflare. Cloudflare OS uses pi-agent-core, but not pi-coding-agent. pi-agent-core, at least the way CFOS uses it right now, is more of an LLM API compatibility layer than a full harness. All the tools and things like compaction are implemented by CFOS itself. The code was actually using ai-sdk (from Vercel) up until a few days ago, when I switched it over to pi-agent-core. Why doesn't it use Think? Mostly because Think actually didn't exist yet when I started writing this, and the designs diverged in a way that made retrofitting hard. The CFOS harness does a few unusual things, like tracking the entire state of the filesystem as the conversation progresses using Yjs (a CRDT), so we can actually rewind the state to see what the agent saw at any particular point in time. I would actually like to delegate more to Pi, because I don't think CFOS should be in the business of thinking about how to implement compaction or to optimize editor tools for each agent. But I'm not really sure if it'll be possible without giving up some cool things about the CFOS harness, so we'll see.
  - jLaForest 3mo ago
    thanks for being responsive in the comments, its great to hear from the people behind the products. One interesting takeaway for me is that cloudflare does less than a few days of SVT before releasing a public product. Not trying to be critical, i just think its a sign of the times that theres so much pressure to release new products that proper SVT is skipped.
    - kentonv 3mo ago
      To be fair the readme is pretty clear that this is "early access" and still in a state of rapid development.
reindeer2 3mo ago
[flagged]
kevinbaiv 3mo ago
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deleted 3mo ago
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anon-3988 3mo ago
The only way this is true secure is that this OS prevents ANYTHING from going out. It cannot make any arbitrary outgoing internet connection. It only has a downstream copy of your data that you are free to manipulate or search from within the system. The only output it has is the desktop GUI. Other than that, it is not secure for an LLM to use because I could be given a document that talks about how to break the system and it would follow the instruction in there dutifully.
dvasdekis 3mo ago
As a paying Cloudflare customer, I am sad that they're spending their engineering talent on this, without first fixing their Terraform driver. Basics first!
- ZebulonP 3mo ago
  (cf engineer) none of the people that worked on this, myself briefly included, are people that work on our terraform driver. Making our terraform support better quickly turns into "how do we fix the quirks present in all our various APIs in a backwards-compatible way" so we have a separate group of engineers working on this problem specifically.
ed_mercer 3mo ago
So it's basically a Claude Desktop clone?
chicagopluto 3mo ago
Interesting bit from the repo: there is an agent's plan (presumably unintentionally) checked in two days ago as part of a rewrite from the Vercel AI SDK to pi-agent-core (https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflare-os/blob/main/plans/pi-impl.md https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflare-os/blob/main/plans/...). That plan states "The project is in early alpha — minor behavioral regressions are acceptable and will be fixed as discovered.".
- kentonv 3mo ago
  Yeah, I checked that in intentionally. I've started checking in plans under `plans/` so that people can see the plan during code review, and also so I can refer to it when I prompt agents about things related to the plan. My usual process for using AI is I first tell it what I want and have it write out a plan. I then review the plan, make comments, and go back and forth until I like it. Then I ask it to implement. I find this makes the final code output much easier to review -- it's almost always very close to what I want on the first try. The project is indeed in early stages. That's mentioned in the readme as well. The reason I had to tell the agent this explicitly is because Fable's original plan called for an overly careful process involving a 2-3 day "spike" to test and derisk. It also wanted to write an elaborate test harness that would run every message through both the old and new paths and compare the results to ensure feature parity. It was way too cautious. I knew that the conversion would actually work fine. And, in fact, it did: the conversion actually fixed more bugs than it introduced. I tweeted about this at the time: https://x.com/KentonVarda/status/2084293600142135365 https://x.com/KentonVarda/status/2084293600142135365
- uptodatenews 3mo ago
  I tried to make something in the same spirit https://github.com/RCSnyder/open-pincery https://github.com/RCSnyder/open-pincery
fenestella 3mo ago
[flagged]
ei8ths 3mo ago
im so sick of this stuff...
luen 3mo ago
It looks like another tool, something along the lines of Codex or Hermes.
agnishom 3mo ago
So, this is not an actual OS? I clicked thinking that I was about to read about some excellent systems innovation, but I was met with automation of boring office work
antonvs 3mo ago
> Every organization has a mission, a reason for being. Organizations pass that mission — along with their terminology, procedures, systems, standards, and ways of working — to their people. Every organization has a mission, a purpose, a raison d’être, a calling, a charter, a mandate, an objective, a North Star, a foundational premise, an animating principle, an existential justification, a reason for being, and if the strategy consultants are billing by the hour, a transformational vision. Organizations pass that mission - along with their terminology, vocabulary, nomenclature, jargon, acronyms, initialisms, buzzwords, euphemisms, procedures, processes, workflows, playbooks, checklists, methodologies, frameworks, systems, platforms, tools, standards, policies, conventions, guidelines, best practices, governance models, compliance requirements, quality gates, templates, forms, rituals, ceremonies, traditions, customs, cultural norms, tribal knowledge, institutional memory, unwritten rules, ways of working, ways of thinking, ways of collaborating, ways of communicating, and ways of filling out expense reports - to their people.
realty_geek 3mo ago
I wonder if some of the ideas in cloudflare OS will find their way into EmDash. Currently I am quite bullish on EmDash.
AussieWog93 3mo ago
I know the CloudFlare CEO reads HN. Every day I see so much cool shit from that org, that as a one man band I just can't trust because there's no billing cap/prepaid billing.
virajk_31 3mo ago
OS?? Reallyy, What nonsense is this marketing?
ernsheong 3mo ago
Anything with the word OS at the end never ends well...
- not_a_bot_4sho 3mo ago
  How do you figure? --- Sent from BeOS
myshapeprotocol 3mo ago
[flagged]
angelofthe0dd 3mo ago
[dead]
xtajv 3mo ago
I am curious how this project compares to Qubes.
- neop1x 3mo ago
  Two different things. Qubes is an OS, while this is not.
SoftTalker 3mo ago
> Thousands of people across every function, many of them outside of engineering, use it every day to create documents and slides, automate repeatable tasks, and build small apps to visualize data and help them do their work. In other words we have convinced them to build their own replacements.
- AmbroseBierce 3mo ago
  That's all it does, a more honest name for AI in the workplace would be to call it TYORT (train your own replacement technology) but companies don't want the soon-to-be replaced to be that much aware of what's happening. Engineers love to talk about how AI is one the greatest invention in their lifetime but the data doesn't show that it has improved quality of life for humans even one bit -like many other inventions can claim- and actually it seems to be doing the opposite, where entry level jobs are vanishing, data centers worsen climate change, stress levels are all time high because workers (logically) believe they will soon be replaced, and on and on; in a very different social framework AI could have been a force for good, but not in this one, not how modern capitalism has shaped society to be.
sparse-Matrix 3mo ago
I always seem to be 'that guy'... but what this really amounts to is cloudflare enticing the users to go 'all-in' on cloudflare, drawing them into and integrating them with the cloudflare ecosystem in a way from which they will never be able to extricate themselves. Customer capture at its finest: "Go with us! its a good thing you'll love it because you'll never get away".
- kentonv 3mo ago
  Thought experiment: Let's imagine that we actually just want to build a product that provides value to customers. No tricks up our sleeves. What would we have done differently in that case?
justanotherunit 3mo ago
Huh, fascinating. Been working on this same architecture on a personal project, and tbh it’s really powerful. This and much else shows that everyone is kinda working on the same thing, just from different locations.

668 points by speckx 3mo ago

I really don't know how folks accept such vendor lock-in. Imagine using Cloudflare Workers as your main tech stack. This is crazy.

wenbin 3mo ago

They had a demo https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49101234 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49101234

britannio 3mo ago
timestamp is 47:45

veunes 3mo ago

[flagged]

thehamkercat 3mo ago

Why are companies slapping "OS" in their product naming? it's stupid

Havoc 3mo ago
Cause they’re trying to build an ecosystem
NetOpWibby 3mo ago
From the GitHub page: This is not a traditional computer operating system. We use the term "operating system" in two senses: - An operating system for the company to be productive with AI, in a way that is safe, so that the security team can sleep at night. - An operating system for AI workloads, analogous to the sense in which a traditional operating system manages compute workloads.
- alt227 3mo ago
  It looks to me like they just wanted to distinguish their product from other AI agents/sandboxes, so they called it an OS to make it sound bigger and better.
  - wuliwong 3mo ago
    Nah, it's just the current lingo in the AI world. Another one they will use is "brain." As far as I can tell "brain" and "OS" are interchangeable. :(
- orphea 3mo ago
  It's awful naming if they have to explain it.
- brazukadev 3mo ago
  the people criticizing the vibecoded name knows what they meant, it is just not correct. It is the same as vegan meat.
  - aziaziazi 3mo ago
    Excluding vegetables from what convey “meat” was also not correct around 1300-1500. Definitions changes with usage and only time will tell the future of vegan steaks, meats, milks, sauvages, butters and other parties. > food, nourishment, sustenance > Narrower sense of "flesh of warm-blooded animals killed and used as food" is attested from c. 1300 https://www.etymonline.com/word/meat https://www.etymonline.com/word/meat
- arandomhuman 3mo ago
  Wow this is really poor justification for its name, the folks at cloudflare really should not be overloading the term "Operating System" pointlessly like this.
  - MattyRad 3mo ago
    They even put it in quotes, because they know what they did. Maybe just take out the word "traditional" and be honest: "This is not an operating system. We're redefining the term because it is convenient for marketing."
radlad 3mo ago
I think because the idea of an "agent operating system" is starting to feel more and more inevitable. Since I can use AI to: - Pull information from external sources - Transform and/or augment that information - Publish information I almost do not need a traditional OS anymore. This obviously isn't entirely true: I still use it to interact directly with humans, and it's the way I access my LLM. For now.
- tkel 3mo ago
  Does your LLM have hardware drivers in it? this is silly.
  - alt227 3mo ago
    Agreed, its like OSes have become so invisible people have actually forgotten what they do.
  - jryle70 3mo ago
    But "virtual machine" is not? Maybe "Virtual OS" is more acceptable?
  - arandomhuman 3mo ago
    This is really approaching peak AI psychosis
  - radlad 3mo ago
    I'm obviously not saying that LLMs replace the glue between hardware and software. That would be absurd. An operating system is just the interface a user has to the programs they run on their computer. Surely you can imagine a world where you boot into a ChatGPT-like interface instead of the desktop OS you are familiar with? Different computing paradigms already exist: mobile OS sure, but also ChromeOS... heck, install Arch Linux and you're dropped into a shell by default - not a GUI. How is this so different? And it doesn't even have to replace your existing OS to be your operating system: If you purchase a cloud VM (say from AWS or DigitalOcean), you're likely running an operating system on top of another operating system already.
mrcwinn 3mo ago
[flagged]
- thomastjeffery 3mo ago
  I disagree. Harness is a pretty great word, and it doesn't already have another familiar meaning.
shostack 3mo ago
Because AI enables a new layer more akin to an actual OS. But also because I imagine they all want all the things running through them and an OS is the widest net they can cast in that direction.
orsorna 3mo ago
Same reason why grifters adopted web3 when Web 3.0 was already an established term.
ikania2026 3mo ago
i too clicked the link by this exactly 2 characters, "OS" should NOT be used in this way.
bearjaws 3mo ago
[flagged]
ignoramous 3mo ago
Andy Jassy et al didn't quite name it that, but AWS was being thought of internally as "Internet OS".
- lern_too_spel 3mo ago
  AWS as an OS also makes sense to me. An OS abstracts the underlying hardware, so the user doesn't have to worry about other users of that hardware if they don't want to and restrict interaction with other user programs in ways that protect those other programs. This is different from OS-less embedded programming, which does have device driver libraries but does not have an OS. People here seem to have a completely wrong idea of what an OS is and are really adamant about it.
1bpp 3mo ago
Because it sounds impressive to clueless people ($).
dwroberts 3mo ago
I agree, it has now become a cliche buzzword that product managers slap on boring non-technical things to make them sound important. Isn’t there even a bug tracker that some company calls an ‘issue OS’ or something absurd?
kentonv 3mo ago
Mostly to get trolls to retweet and complain about it for free advertising. It's working. ;)
- ncr100 3mo ago
  Is this a public-relations policy at Cloudflare?
sixdimensional 3mo ago
You're missing the subtle marketecture trick here they are doing.. Non-technical people don't always think of an OS as the computer OS. To them, sometimes it means more like standard operating procedure or process - a standard way of doing things. Secondly, for tech products, calling yourself an OS, you are associating yourself with things like Windows, Mac or Linux. You are indirectly trying to grandstand and position yourself as meaningful enough to be an "OS" when clearly, that is far from what an app layer + AI/LLM on top of a real OS is. The biggest giveaway is this, and I'm exposing it right here -from a technical perspective, what operating system computer technology was built from scratch from first principles around AI/LLM? Someone wants to be the first company to get huge sums of money/funding to be that startup/project, so that is also a positioning tactic. The issue is of course, most people are standing on the shoulders of giants at this point... and OS has this conflicted meaning with nontechnical users also about work process vs the software that runs my computer.
- fl4regun 3mo ago
  >you are associating yourself with things like Windows, Mac or Linux But this is nothing like those things.
  - sixdimensional 3mo ago
    Yes - I agree - that is what I am trying to say in fact. But the association gets made because of the naming. The only dictionary definition of "operating system" I see is like the technical one on Wikipedia [1], which IS more like Windows, Mac or Linux.. not like an app or platform. From my concise Oxford English Dictionary, for example.. "operating system, n. the low-level software that supports a computer's basic functions". Like, would it be better if it was just called the "Cloudflare App"? Or the "Cloudflare App Platform"? or the "Cloudflare Platform App"? Those aren't clear winners either, they could easily be confused for product offerings or other things. They could name it, like, "Cloudflare Rocket" (random product name) or "Cloudflare Jane" (e.g. personality) and then say, "this is the desktop app for Cloudflare Jane, which is a platform where we put all these tools and capabilities that combine with agentic powers".. but then it wouldn't have the marketing flair either. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_system
pizzafeelsright 3mo ago
People do not use an 'OS' anymore. Anything internet is a hundred pieces of hardware over 1000 kilometers apart providing an interface to an application with a KVM (for now)
clhodapp 3mo ago
Marketing types have started subbing in "Operating System" for "Platform" lately. And, because it feels bold and fresh to them, they often name whole product an "OS" when they do this in order to make anyone who talks about the product re-sell the pitch for them.
neop1x 3mo ago
It's such a bad decision. It just creates more confusion.

palata 3mo ago

I am confused... it's not an OS, is it?

thrownaway561 3mo ago
https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflare-os#cloudflare-os-an-ai-productivity-environment https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflare-os#cloudflare-os-an... This is not a traditional computer operating system. We use the term "operating system" in two senses: An operating system for the company to be productive with AI, in a way that is safe, so that the security team can sleep at night. An operating system for AI workloads, analogous to the sense in which a traditional operating system manages compute workloads.
- sethops1 3mo ago
  > We use the term "operating system" incorrectly. FTF[them]
- alt227 3mo ago
  > An operating system for AI workloads, analogous to the sense in which a traditional operating system manages compute workloads. They have really twisted the definition to fit their marketing here. Operating systems are what allow you to use hardware to interact with software. Their product does nothing comparable to that at all.
- philipwhiuk 3mo ago
  They still use the term in the “definitions” so they aren’t actually defining anything

rozenmd 3mo ago

I liked Kenton's take on this: https://x.com/KentonVarda/status/2084990137180590572?s=20 https://x.com/KentonVarda/status/2084990137180590572?s=20 Text from tweet: Today we are releasing Cloudflare OS, a chatbot with connectors, just like every other tech company is doing. Except actually, it's different. This is a remake of Sandstorm[.]io, my startup from 10 years ago, except this time built on Cloudflare Workers (the platform I've spent the last 9 years building) and deeply leveraging AI. This is more or less the culmination of my secret 10-year master plan. This is a full-on personal app vibe coding platform, in which the sandbox is so secure that you can pretty much go wild -- the AI cannot introduce a significant security bug. We believe a company's security team can feel comfortable giving non-technical users permission to vibe code and then sleep soundly at night. How is that possible? It's the Sandstorm security model, revisited. A "Gadget" is the same thing as a Sandstorm "Grain": a fine-grained app instance. For example, if you have a document editor app, each document runs as a separate instance of the app, in a separate sandbox (one "Gadget"). This means two things, both of which I think are Big Deals: 1. The platform can manage all access control, by controlling who can access the Gadget at all. There is no way the Gadget can accidentally leak itself to an attacker -- even an attacker who has access to other Gadgets based on the same app. 2. Since everyone is running their own copy of the code, everyone can freely modify their copy of the code. Think about #2 a bit more. What if, when you wanted a new feature in the software you are using, you could just prompt your agent to add it? This doesn't work in the cloud Software-as-a-Service model, because you are not running your own copy of the app. Sandstorm tried to change that 10 years ago, but the world wasn't ready, because not enough people had the skills or patience to actually modify their software. AI has changed that. Now you just ask the agent -- the same agent that you are using to help you interact with the Gadget can also modify the code of the Gadget. And it is so fun.

NetOpWibby 3mo ago
Damn, this is a pretty big deal!
- BonerWiener 3mo ago
  Can you explain why you think this is a big deal? What particular feature/capability made you think this? I do not disagree but i am curios. Lets have a discussion instead of just throwing feel good vibes around...

rvz 3mo ago

From: https://os.cloudflare.app/ https://os.cloudflare.app/ > "Give every person an agent and workspace built around how your company works, what it knows, and the systems it relies on." Hundreds of thousands of so called "AI startups" have been eliminated.

vehemenz 3mo ago
Or they can just transition to Cloudflare OS and keep their domain-specific data proprietary, which is where the money is in the first place.

wxw 3mo ago

This is effectively a Codex/Claude app competitor. Good move from Cloudflare since it helps them sell their core infra offerings. I like the direction they’re going with access control.

alansaber 3mo ago
Yep, a pre-wrapped Codex for enterprise. Seems like the logical evolution from setting up an MCP.
- mrcwinn 3mo ago
  Codex for enterprise is Codex for enterprise.
bearjaws 3mo ago
The real question is, can Cloudflare become a equal or better OpenAI / Claude provider, while offering a vastly more robust platform than either? I think the answer is yes, simply because both OAI and Anthropic leverage CF for their hosting today. I used to meme back in 2008 (when Google docs first was becoming big) that "The problem has always been the sandbox". The problem Chrome and Firefox solved was the Sandbox - you can browse some random code across the web without worrying about getting hacked. The same problem has arisen today but now with AI agents. There is likely to be huge winners in the AI space simply based on who can create the best way to contain AI agents and "expose AI value" safely.
dgellow 3mo ago
So, that means even more pressure on OpenAI and Anthropic. I really don’t see how they will stay competitive long term. Cloudflare can offers way better product by integrating with the rest of their platform and offering a variety of models, including open models they host themselves

alansaber 3mo ago

So, a security-oriented cloud agent framework? Better call it an OS.

iamniels 3mo ago

This is close to what I need for my company. Currently I'm test driving Open WebUI. https://github.com/open-webui/open-webui https://github.com/open-webui/open-webui

bezko 3mo ago
Stay away, I had bad experience myself, I'm sure there is something better out there. For me I ended up asking Claude to build a custom RAG pipeline, took an afternoon and is 10x faster.

Lwrless 3mo ago

[dead]

vehemenz 3mo ago

> Cloudflare OS is available today and is open source. Check out the cloudflare-os GitHub repository. You can deploy it into your own Cloudflare account and use your own Access policies, AI Gateway configuration, data, and integrations. In case anybody missed it.

hobofan 3mo ago
It's open source, but it is so incredibly tied to their platform, that there is no vendor portability, which has made almost every of their product launches post-Workers kind of meh.
- CrimsonRain 3mo ago
  workerd is OSS

zsoltkacsandi 3mo ago

Seemingly Cloudflare’s strategy nowadays is shipping “open-source” projects that are coupled with their own infastructure. First EmDash CMS, now this.

9cb14c1ec0 3mo ago
Not a bad marketing strategy. Vendor lock in matters a lot less to some people than it does to me.
arm32 3mo ago
OH! I get it. OS = "open source"!

yomismoaqui 3mo ago

Everytime I read about new things from Cloudflare they look really cool but I cannot shake the feeling of not wanting to use them for fear of lock-in, am I too paranoid?

deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
doublerabbit 3mo ago
Cloudflare is just another corporation with greed in their eyes and if you don't design yourself to their puzzle than you're not welcomed. This is an extra wall in walled garden land; another one you will need to jump if you want to break free. Another stab at gatekeeping the upcoming Ai era of the internet. It's no different to the playbook of Google, Apple, and Facebook of the 00's. So, no, you're not paranoid. In the terms of security: My firefox on FreeBSD instantly triggers endless loops of "prove your human" on their turnstile. I can't use old handhelds of android and a single VPN triggers all. Anything that they don't see as "secure" you're denied from. What is stopping Cloudflare from deeming your LLM as unsafe? Scenario: You're ready to launch, you come up with the next best innovation for the next generation of Ai internet. Revolutionary and you're about to launch, blast off; wait. You're denied your launch because it threatens their service. The former: they like your idea more-so and clone it to become theirs. Stories of above have all been posted on HN before. Startups have been sabotaged by rug-pulling of cloud providers. It is early-vendor lock-in and at it's best. Google & Co would be jealous; if they were not in bed with. This will turn in to a netting of: Your Ai isn't using our service, so your Ai isn't allowed to interact with ours. What does Cloudflare offer as a service? A turnstile to the Internet of Things and the difference this time is that you get to self-host your own corner on their patch of land with their ticket prices and access policy of. Remember folks, no corporation gives a rat's ass about you. Internally, or externally, you're just another sheep to extract wool from.
Lucasoato 3mo ago
No, you’re not too paranoid. It has already proven both in the software and hardware world what vendor lock-in can lead to. Also check out Bunny.net.
3mo ago

fnoef 3mo ago

"OS for work" - like, what does it mean? OS is operating system, it runs on a hardware and provides you to operate the system. I hate when companies destroy the English language with vibe invented terms.

Kudos 3mo ago
If this succeeds, it's going to be in spite of its branding and marketing.
lern_too_spel 3mo ago
An operating system manages access to shared hardware (disk, CPU, memory, networking, display, etc. on a single machine OS). MS-DOS mainly handled shared access to disk via a file system abstraction, hence the name. The naming of Cloudflare OS makes sense to me.
- hashstring 3mo ago
  It doesn’t schedule tasks, doesn’t deal with physical memory, it doesn’t initialize hardware or interface with it on a low level. This is just an app that lives in user-space, nothing more. Calling this an OS is like calling Gmail an OS. It doesn’t make any sense. But since OSes are notoriously difficult to define [1], half of America added AI slop to diets that were already repulsive to begin with, regurgitates the chyme, and passionately feeds it to their peers, you may even get away with it nowadays. [1] https://os.ecci.ucr.ac.cr/slides/Andrew-S.-Tanenbaum-Modern-Operating-Systems.pdf https://os.ecci.ucr.ac.cr/slides/Andrew-S.-Tanenbaum-Modern-...
  - sintax 3mo ago
    Counter point: emacs :)
  - kentonv 3mo ago
    > It doesn’t schedule tasks, It absolutely does. > doesn’t deal with physical memory, Well it sort of does. It allocates sandboxes and schedules apps in them. It handles loading code from storage and turning it into running programs with state. > it doesn’t initialize hardware or interface with it on a low level. Instead of devices it manages interfacing with external services (Gatekeepers are like drivers). I didn't choose the name but I do think there's a fair analogy here even on a technical level.

badlibrarian 3mo ago

This represents a small part of what IT is worried about. Offer a beer and say the word "SharePoint" if you want the long version of where this could wind up. The issue isn't letting end-users add features. The issue is twelve end-users customizing something that produces output, saving it, and now nobody can read it. This can get solved. If it even gets a chance to gain traction (it should, though IT will of course push back). But let's not pretend we're there yet.

pjmlp 3mo ago

Ah look, yet another one jumping into AI party.

ocdtrekkie 3mo ago
This is the middle of Cloudflare's "Agents Week"... and I believe they had an Agents Week last year. We're like... at least a year or two into Cloudflare being in the AI party. ;)
- pjmlp 3mo ago
  Well, one needs to keep surviving the hype wave, not that other surfers overtake it.

pelagicAustral 3mo ago

Probably better if they make it obvious that you need Workers paid plan: "Your Cloudflare account is on the Free plan, but the Cloudflare OS backend needs Dynamic Workers, which requires the Workers Paid plan."

elicash 3mo ago
This is just if you don't want to host it yourself, no?
- pelagicAustral 3mo ago
  Far as I can tell, even if you host it yourself you are still bound to their workers.
  - orakmoya 3mo ago
    which are open sourced [1]. I tried deploying it and had Deepseek v4 Flash create a dumb whiteboarding app. [1] https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd

deleted 3mo ago

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4lx87 3mo ago

Engineers should be wary about being forced into using particular prompts/skills/instructions. Why would I use a shared LLM-in-the-cloud, instead of my own? The shared one precludes any possibility to customize or differentiate my workflow, prompts, or skills. As an employee that sounds like a death sentence to doing my job effectively.

kentonv 3mo ago
That's why this is open source. https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflare-os https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflare-os You're supposed to customize it. Also it features a whole system for adding your own skills and context.

prathje 3mo ago

Setting up your public URLRetrying… (attempt 5 of 6) Fingers crossed!! The last one gotta be the one... EDIT: It let me down... (Something unexpected went wrong on our side.) Please let me now if deploying it on your custom domain worked for you please... EDIT: Retrying it now worked but I had to subscribe to R2 (which is free for 10GB apparently). However, after that it will tell you that you need to enable the Dynamic Workers which is actually paid... "Your Cloudflare account is on the Free plan, but the Cloudflare OS backend needs Dynamic Workers, which requires the Workers Paid plan." So no free preview for me today.

hmokiguess 3mo ago

I can't help but wonder if these things that are now emerging have a sort of "borrowed time" component tied to them. I see the examples, and they clearly tackle both organizational inefficiencies and human connection/communication as the core problems. Sounds like things are converging to "my AI will talk to your AI" and the role of humans will just be a human "router" in the loop switching up nodes in a graph, like the return of Switchboard Operators from the 1950s.

asdev 3mo ago

Everyone is building these same looking apps that look like Codex, Claude desktop. We don't need these. Slackbots work more than well enough to collaborate with agents.

q8zd3 3mo ago

Why do people add "OS" to their product/project name when it is not an OS at all?

reallyreason 3mo ago
Indeed, at this point it's one of the most devalued terms in software. Every week I'm reading about some product calling itself "the Operating System for XYZ." It seems like it's what you do when "platform" just feels too modest. To me, if it's not bootable, calling your product an OS just reeks of marketing sleight of hand.
spencerflem 3mo ago
In some sense, it is. Sandstorm called itself an OS too. Arcan calls itself an Overlay-OS. I think for any platform for general purpose computing that provides an application model that programs are written to target, it's close enough I don't mind. Ie: it makes sense for some end-user software to have a target for Windows, Linux, Sandstorm, etc. & from the other side- what does Debian add that lets it call itself an OS? A set environment and package manager that software is specifically packaged for.
- q8zd3 3mo ago
  I see a Linux distro as a "integration project", which delivers several software pieces glued together that work in harmony, which includes "OS pieces" such as the Linux kernel.
palata 3mo ago
Because "The Android of ..." is out of fashion?

isodev 3mo ago

Wait, isn’t that what Mistral does for their Vibe interface for companies?

wasabi359 3mo ago

[flagged]

xgulfie 3mo ago

gas town 2 real???

sreekanth850 3mo ago

how this can be compared against Microsoft agent framework?

therepanic 3mo ago

Why?

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

yewenjie 3mo ago

Has anyone experienced using Buzz or YC's qm? How does this compare with those?

s20n 3mo ago

Finally, we have an "OS" written in typescript. And here I was thinking that an OS would be the only exception to Atwood's law /s

tonetheman 3mo ago

[dead]

luciana1u 3mo ago

[flagged]

dukeofdoom 3mo ago

How do you install this? Where's the download link.

arm32 3mo ago
It's an operating system, so perhaps you need the ISO...
kentonv 3mo ago
https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflare-os https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflare-os

agentdev001 3mo ago

Im having a hard time figuring out what the intended user interface is here. The screenshots im seeing makes this look to be an electron app, but the repo seems to be implying that this is a deployed web app. If this is just another librechat I'll be disappointed, and frustrated- because this is so 5 months ago.

giancarlostoro 3mo ago

Really not a fan of calling things an OS that are not an OS. This seems interesting, but it is also tied to CloudFlare workers, so beware.

rightbondsadmin 3mo ago

I'm curious if the primary customer will be developers or IT admins

arm32 3mo ago

If Cloudflare's been using this internally, could that explain why their dashboards are so confused, disjointed and broken?

sciencejerk 3mo ago

But is it actually an OS?

angry_octet 3mo ago
Is Chrome?
- EasyMark 3mo ago
  Does chrome claim to be an OS? or are you talking about chrome os which is an OS built on top of a Linux kernel, kind of like ubuntu or redhat

angry_octet 3mo ago

This is revolutionary stuff. It crystalises latent thoughts I've had about how to safely integrate agentic capability for serious work. We're starting to see indifferently architected AI creep into every engineering tool, from requirements management to coding, MATLAB, EDA and Solidworks. At the same time we see LLMs orchestrating long running hacking campaigns that will leverage other agents and automation to propagate. We really need an architecture that can handle that complexity. Kenton Varda hitting the ball out of the park again.

colinrand 3mo ago

this is a cool idea, but i suspect will be limited in use cases. the vast majority of people don't want or can't modify their software competently and will rely on others to do that. once you're relying on someone else, they do not want to maintain different copies for every user, that sounds like a maintenance nightmare for admins or else such a new paradigm that it takes a new generation of admins 20 years to get comfortable.

moody__ 3mo ago

When did junk like this start being called an operating system?

p0w3n3d 3mo ago
The same question is bothering me

jakswa 3mo ago

Seems like a good candidate to replace my home-grown llama.cpp web UI clone. This comment used to be a gripe about their provider UX not giving an example URL (realized /v1 is expected as the final segment).

sschueller 3mo ago

So to run this 'OS', I need to have an existing running OS...

aegisora_ai 3mo ago

[dead]

aegisora_ai 3mo ago

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overgard 3mo ago

I'm mostly going off the tweet, it could be I just don't understand, but how do you managed shared data if everyone has their own copy of the code and they can add whatever features they want? I mean, I'm assuming that any sort of significant feature requires some sort of change to the data model, and even with a schema-less database you could have conflicts if two things use the same field name, for instance? Also what happens with updates? Like, part of IT is keeping people up to date, but if everyone has their own bespoke customizations how do you not clobber those? Also the security story doesn't completely add up to me. Like, if I'm a user and I can just add features that I want, what's to stop me from placing data in there that's maybe covered under HIPPA or some other sensitive data (protected class, or even just stuff like authentication information)? Right now a small number of people need to think about data security, but this seems like it'd extend it to anyone? That kind of data, it's not just about "keeping it internal by default", there are a lot of rules around storing it at all. I dunno, it kind of makes me think of when people suggest forking an open source project if the maintainers won't accept a suggestion. Sure, you can do that, and it does happen, but you're also basically signing up to maintain it for decades. I'm not sure if anyone wants to maintain Alice in accounting's very weird spreadsheet app 10 years after she's left the company? (Again I'm not throwing shade, just trying to understand better)

kentonv 3mo ago
The key is the fine-grained instances (gadgets). E.g. if you're using a slide editor app, each slide deck you create is its own instance of the app, whose code can be independently modified. The slide content and the code are kept together and sandboxed together. Adding HIPPA data to the app is no different to adding it to the slide content. I suppose whether or not that is OK depends on a lot of things, but the same things apply to traditional PowerPoint. The fact that the code is modifiable doesn't change the situation, since those modifications are sandboxed and constrained to that one slide deck.
- heybales 3mo ago
  I hope there are no healthcare CEOs reading this and if there are, please, for the love of god, do not let your execs or providers use cloud platforms to create apps with HIPAA data in them unless your lawyer is really bored and you have cash to burn on all the fines and lawsuits. Also don't offload yet another responsibility (i.e software development) to the people trying to take care of patients.

rcarmo 3mo ago

I have a feeling we're all working towards the same thing, but with different frameworks and infra. The Cloudflare OS experience looks, to me, very much like what I created for myself with https://rcarmo.github.io/projects/piclaw https://rcarmo.github.io/projects/piclaw (except that I rely on focusing different instances on different sets of skills and tooling, so only two have "Office" skills, for instance).

eigencoder 3mo ago

I think this is trying to do something similar to exe.dev, but not doing it as well

chews 3mo ago
I am an exe customer and happy with the product, but this has support for sockets and grpc. This is a slightly more capable product for various use cases.

mannanj 3mo ago

Does this beat self-stewarding my data, and placing relevant protections around my data instead. Then the UI's, the "Apps", are just ephemeral instances over my live data whose permission I am consistently setting or reviewing. I feel like that more accurately represents a "person" behind the data: when I am producing, creating and expressing in real life, I do not ask some intermediary 3rd-party for permission to access my voice and my output. I just produce and let whatever gets created be made there in the physical environment or in someone's head. Today's apps (edit: & cloudflare's direction here) feel more like "The moment I express or generate something, I lease it's output from someone else and ask for their permission to access my output".

scottydelta 3mo ago

Well everyone is trying to create an environment where they can safely delegate tasks to agents. I am no different, but my approach is a dedicated powerful computer on your desk rather than something in the cloud. I am calling it Tarvis AI (derived from TARS from Interstellar and Jarvis from Iron Man), more details here: https://tarvisai.com https://tarvisai.com I have tried many of the VM/cloud-based agent setups, and they either tend to be only novelties since you can’t do much with 2-4 vCPUs + limited RAM or they start racking up expensive cloud bills. I realized that the underlying operating systems for AI have to be built from the ground up for agents instead of taking current OSes and taming them for agents. Not sure how much of that philosophy is followed by Cloudflare. Excited to see growth in this area.

allenstanlee 3mo ago

I think it is cool!

allenstanlee 3mo ago

I think this is cool!

aarjaneiro 3mo ago

This "OS" label reminds me of ms with ".NET", a choice they definitely seemed to regret

notnmeyer 3mo ago

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deleted 3mo ago

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programd 3mo ago

Also worth reading is the blog post by the Cloudflare CIO Sam Rhea on how they are actually using it internally, with some examples. https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-we-use-ai-with-cloudflare-os/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-we-use-ai-with-cloudflare-os...

jakswa 3mo ago

In case anyone else is curious, local Gemma4 12B Q6 XL really struggles to make use of this for simple goals like a daily briefing after an MCP tool call. I don't think there's a simple artifact concept? Still early but confused.

avoidstupidity 3mo ago

[dead]

cdolan 3mo ago
ive been tinkering with this all day. its far more than a chat app. going to change how our team collaborates on work tasks

mcfdoesdev 3mo ago

[flagged]

ninglor 3mo ago

Cool. The gadgets/blueprints paradigm reminds me of Smalltalk or Lisp environments in a way -- you're shipping a messy thing, a packaged version of your own personal, always-evolving environment. Natural language wrapper around programming. Sandboxing and controlling external interactions to minimize the cost of mistakes. As I see it, the core idea here is facilitating habitability (in the Richard P Gabriel sense) via abstracting software development and distribution in a way that allows non-programmers to engage. I'm not sure LLMs are quite there with results/$ to fully support a personal computing revolution here. I suspect useful blueprints will largely be wrappers or reimplementations of software that is still primarily created and distributed outside of this environment. But there's promise here, and it's cool.

dennisy 3mo ago

A question to the other builders in this space: how are you positioning yourself and differentiating against incumbents like this or even Claude Cowork? Are you finding many clients looking at your system and telling you they could prompt Claude directly?

jesse_dot_id 3mo ago

AOS would make more sense for the naming convention here.

arush15june 3mo ago

I just deployed it on my cloudflare workers, it went live in a minute, worked through my CF Access SSO. Wasn't able to configure providers easily. But reading the blog this is wild! I have been driving a hermes agent off a VM in a proxmox from my slack and wondering how to handle security. If this takes off, this is really how enterprise agents should end up looking like. The dynamic workers hosting applications is the AI Appsmith/Retool that I need for internal dashboards.

indigodaddy 3mo ago
No luck either with custom providers from the AI Gateway working within CFOS (deployed to my CF account)...
mlrtime 3mo ago
Why not deploy cloudflare-os on proxmox?
- arush15june 3mo ago
  It was just easier to use the deploy button on the repo tbh
- yaronsh 3mo ago
  We have an alternative for Cloudflare OS running on k8s. Next release is also including external services concept, which is already developed before Cloudflare OS was released. https://github.com/SimaDevelopment/opsiforce https://github.com/SimaDevelopment/opsiforce

seebeen 3mo ago

Oh my god. Who asked for this? Who needs this? Why is everything being enshittified. I can't take this any more srsly.

britannio 3mo ago
Notably they have been using it internally since May. This is their v2.

liampulles 3mo ago

We've pivoted pretty hard from infra being cattle, haven't we?

ahriad 3mo ago

They gated it to US providers only, fucking garbage

kentonv 3mo ago
Not intentionally, we just haven't gotten around to expanding the provider list beyond what we use regularly. There is ollama (local LLM) support in there. But we'll probably expand it to everything pi-agent-core supports, just need some UI work.
- ahriad 3mo ago
  I'm talking about setting up one provider for the entire OS not about BYOK per user. Right now only cloudflare AI gateway is supported and in it you hardcoded it to US providers. Plus your AI workers and from your model you only supporting two.
  - kentonv 3mo ago
    The code currently supports Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, Workers AI, and ollama as AI providers. It additionally optionally supports sending all requests through Cloudflare AI Gateway as a proxy. The same set of providers is supported either way, but when you configure AI Gateway, we assume you intend to install side-wide API keys into the gateway. The idea here is that you're setting up the gateway for your entire company, and you want all users to use the same keys. So we no longer let individual users configure their own keys in this mode -- instead they can choose from among the providers you have configured site-wide. We will expand the provider list soon.
    - indigodaddy 3mo ago
      I can't get an AI Gateway custom provider to work within CFOS (deployed to my CF account). No matter what custom model path I use in the cfos admin add provider mechanism, I get a model not found error when attempting to use the model in a conversation...

taw1285 3mo ago

It looks like this product uses pi-agent directly (https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflare-os/blob/main/plans/pi-impl.md https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflare-os/blob/main/plans/...). How come Cloudflare is not using their homegrown Agents SDK / Think / Flue harness for this? I am asking genuinely as I am evaluating a harness to build my agent platform.

kentonv 3mo ago
Flue is actually also built on Pi. We are big Pi fans at Cloudflare. Cloudflare OS uses pi-agent-core, but not pi-coding-agent. pi-agent-core, at least the way CFOS uses it right now, is more of an LLM API compatibility layer than a full harness. All the tools and things like compaction are implemented by CFOS itself. The code was actually using ai-sdk (from Vercel) up until a few days ago, when I switched it over to pi-agent-core. Why doesn't it use Think? Mostly because Think actually didn't exist yet when I started writing this, and the designs diverged in a way that made retrofitting hard. The CFOS harness does a few unusual things, like tracking the entire state of the filesystem as the conversation progresses using Yjs (a CRDT), so we can actually rewind the state to see what the agent saw at any particular point in time. I would actually like to delegate more to Pi, because I don't think CFOS should be in the business of thinking about how to implement compaction or to optimize editor tools for each agent. But I'm not really sure if it'll be possible without giving up some cool things about the CFOS harness, so we'll see.
- jLaForest 3mo ago
  thanks for being responsive in the comments, its great to hear from the people behind the products. One interesting takeaway for me is that cloudflare does less than a few days of SVT before releasing a public product. Not trying to be critical, i just think its a sign of the times that theres so much pressure to release new products that proper SVT is skipped.
  - kentonv 3mo ago
    To be fair the readme is pretty clear that this is "early access" and still in a state of rapid development.

reindeer2 3mo ago

[flagged]

kevinbaiv 3mo ago

[dead]

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

anon-3988 3mo ago

The only way this is true secure is that this OS prevents ANYTHING from going out. It cannot make any arbitrary outgoing internet connection. It only has a downstream copy of your data that you are free to manipulate or search from within the system. The only output it has is the desktop GUI. Other than that, it is not secure for an LLM to use because I could be given a document that talks about how to break the system and it would follow the instruction in there dutifully.

dvasdekis 3mo ago

As a paying Cloudflare customer, I am sad that they're spending their engineering talent on this, without first fixing their Terraform driver. Basics first!

ZebulonP 3mo ago
(cf engineer) none of the people that worked on this, myself briefly included, are people that work on our terraform driver. Making our terraform support better quickly turns into "how do we fix the quirks present in all our various APIs in a backwards-compatible way" so we have a separate group of engineers working on this problem specifically.

ed_mercer 3mo ago

So it's basically a Claude Desktop clone?

chicagopluto 3mo ago

Interesting bit from the repo: there is an agent's plan (presumably unintentionally) checked in two days ago as part of a rewrite from the Vercel AI SDK to pi-agent-core (https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflare-os/blob/main/plans/pi-impl.md https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflare-os/blob/main/plans/...). That plan states "The project is in early alpha — minor behavioral regressions are acceptable and will be fixed as discovered.".

kentonv 3mo ago
Yeah, I checked that in intentionally. I've started checking in plans under `plans/` so that people can see the plan during code review, and also so I can refer to it when I prompt agents about things related to the plan. My usual process for using AI is I first tell it what I want and have it write out a plan. I then review the plan, make comments, and go back and forth until I like it. Then I ask it to implement. I find this makes the final code output much easier to review -- it's almost always very close to what I want on the first try. The project is indeed in early stages. That's mentioned in the readme as well. The reason I had to tell the agent this explicitly is because Fable's original plan called for an overly careful process involving a 2-3 day "spike" to test and derisk. It also wanted to write an elaborate test harness that would run every message through both the old and new paths and compare the results to ensure feature parity. It was way too cautious. I knew that the conversion would actually work fine. And, in fact, it did: the conversion actually fixed more bugs than it introduced. I tweeted about this at the time: https://x.com/KentonVarda/status/2084293600142135365 https://x.com/KentonVarda/status/2084293600142135365
uptodatenews 3mo ago
I tried to make something in the same spirit https://github.com/RCSnyder/open-pincery https://github.com/RCSnyder/open-pincery

fenestella 3mo ago

[flagged]

ei8ths 3mo ago

im so sick of this stuff...

luen 3mo ago

It looks like another tool, something along the lines of Codex or Hermes.

agnishom 3mo ago

So, this is not an actual OS? I clicked thinking that I was about to read about some excellent systems innovation, but I was met with automation of boring office work

antonvs 3mo ago

> Every organization has a mission, a reason for being. Organizations pass that mission — along with their terminology, procedures, systems, standards, and ways of working — to their people. Every organization has a mission, a purpose, a raison d’être, a calling, a charter, a mandate, an objective, a North Star, a foundational premise, an animating principle, an existential justification, a reason for being, and if the strategy consultants are billing by the hour, a transformational vision. Organizations pass that mission - along with their terminology, vocabulary, nomenclature, jargon, acronyms, initialisms, buzzwords, euphemisms, procedures, processes, workflows, playbooks, checklists, methodologies, frameworks, systems, platforms, tools, standards, policies, conventions, guidelines, best practices, governance models, compliance requirements, quality gates, templates, forms, rituals, ceremonies, traditions, customs, cultural norms, tribal knowledge, institutional memory, unwritten rules, ways of working, ways of thinking, ways of collaborating, ways of communicating, and ways of filling out expense reports - to their people.

realty_geek 3mo ago

I wonder if some of the ideas in cloudflare OS will find their way into EmDash. Currently I am quite bullish on EmDash.

AussieWog93 3mo ago

I know the CloudFlare CEO reads HN. Every day I see so much cool shit from that org, that as a one man band I just can't trust because there's no billing cap/prepaid billing.

virajk_31 3mo ago

OS?? Reallyy, What nonsense is this marketing?

ernsheong 3mo ago

Anything with the word OS at the end never ends well...

not_a_bot_4sho 3mo ago
How do you figure? --- Sent from BeOS

myshapeprotocol 3mo ago

[flagged]

angelofthe0dd 3mo ago

[dead]

xtajv 3mo ago

I am curious how this project compares to Qubes.

neop1x 3mo ago
Two different things. Qubes is an OS, while this is not.

SoftTalker 3mo ago

> Thousands of people across every function, many of them outside of engineering, use it every day to create documents and slides, automate repeatable tasks, and build small apps to visualize data and help them do their work. In other words we have convinced them to build their own replacements.

AmbroseBierce 3mo ago
That's all it does, a more honest name for AI in the workplace would be to call it TYORT (train your own replacement technology) but companies don't want the soon-to-be replaced to be that much aware of what's happening. Engineers love to talk about how AI is one the greatest invention in their lifetime but the data doesn't show that it has improved quality of life for humans even one bit -like many other inventions can claim- and actually it seems to be doing the opposite, where entry level jobs are vanishing, data centers worsen climate change, stress levels are all time high because workers (logically) believe they will soon be replaced, and on and on; in a very different social framework AI could have been a force for good, but not in this one, not how modern capitalism has shaped society to be.

sparse-Matrix 3mo ago

I always seem to be 'that guy'... but what this really amounts to is cloudflare enticing the users to go 'all-in' on cloudflare, drawing them into and integrating them with the cloudflare ecosystem in a way from which they will never be able to extricate themselves. Customer capture at its finest: "Go with us! its a good thing you'll love it because you'll never get away".

kentonv 3mo ago
Thought experiment: Let's imagine that we actually just want to build a product that provides value to customers. No tricks up our sleeves. What would we have done differently in that case?

justanotherunit 3mo ago

Huh, fascinating. Been working on this same architecture on a personal project, and tbh it’s really powerful. This and much else shows that everyone is kinda working on the same thing, just from different locations.