Cloudflare claimed they implemented Matrix on Cloudflare workers. They didn't

5 hours ago (tech.lgbt)

My charitable read on this is that an individual vibe-coded both the post and repository and was able to publish to the Cloudflare blog without it actually being reviewed or vetted. They also are not an engineer and when the agent hallucinated “I have built and tested this and it is production grade,” they took it at face value.

You can tell since the code is in a public repository and not Cloudflare’s, which IMO is the big giveaway that this is a lesson for Cloudflare in having appropriate review processes for public comms and for the individual to avoid making claims they cannot substantiate or verify independently.

  • This person works for Cloudflare. What else are they "vibe coding?" How long until Cloudflare shuts off half the internet due to a "mistake" again? How much longer are we going to accept that these are mistakes?

  • I agree, but it's probably not just about being "able to" do it, but about what the incentives and pressures are in that organization.

    Cloudflare apparently considers blog posts to be a key deliverable for many roles. Not just marketing or devrel but engineering too. That sets up a lot of incentives for slop. And then all you need for a disaster is a high trust environment with insufficient controls, which they probably have since the process had worked for a decade without an insufficiently reviewed article blowing up in their face.

    Going forward there will be just a little bit less trust, more controls, and more friction that will make it harder to get a post out in a timely manner. It's just the way all organizations evolve. You can see from the scar tissue where problems existed in the past.

    What I can't believe is that they haven't retracted the whole post by now, but are allowing the author to make an even bigger mess trying to fix the initial problems.

Technical blogs from infrastructure companies used to serve two purposes: demonstrate expertise and build trust. When the posts start overpromising, you lose both.

I don't know enough about this specific implementation to say whether "implemented Matrix" is accurate or marketing stretch. But the pattern of "we did X" blog posts that turn out to be "we did a demo of part of X" is getting tiresome across the industry.

The fix is boring: just be precise about what you built. "We prototyped a Matrix homeserver on Workers with these limitations" is less exciting but doesn't erode trust.

  • To be fair, the technical posts from Cloudflare are usually very insightful.

    • Usually. Previously.

      I raised this point on a previous Cloudflare blog post - they've turned quite vapid these days. If you pay attention, they're stuffed to the brim with generated text which is sloppy and under-opinionated on the audience for the writing in the first place.

    • Yeah normally the CF blog ranks as one of the best in the world in my book, so a post of lower quality and potentially AI slop really stands out here.

      That said I think the concept of a full matrix server running all on CF infrastructure/services is an awesome blog post from CF.

      Honestly I wish CF would simply unpublish/retract this blog post, put another engineer on it to help the PM, and spend another couple of weeks polishing the post/code to republish the same blog post.

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  • They can't do that though. If they did, it would make the shareholders and CEOs mad because it would demonstrate that LLMs cannot (yet) deliver on all the promises these CEOs have been claiming for this entire time.

I'd love to see a root cause analysis post by Cloudflare for this one. The ones they do after outages are always interesting to read. How did this make it into the blog? What is the review process for these posts and what failed this time? What measures will be taken to restore Cloudflare blog's reputation?

So the original post had this added to the top:

> This post was updated at 11:15 a.m. Pacific time to clarify that the use case described here is a proof of concept. Some sections have been updated for clarity.

But then the bottom still says:

> Our team is using Matrix on Workers, handling real encrypted communications. It is fast, it is cheap, and it is arguably one of the most secure ways to deploy a homeserver today.

Which one is it?

  • I don't believe "Our team is using Matrix on Workers." The repo is in someone's personal Github and a pretty incomplete and insecure implementation.

  • I guess they're dogfooding something that's wildly insecure and incomplete internally. Kind of surprising that's allowed on CloudFlare's internal network if true, but I guess shadow-IT is everywhere.

I found the source code Jade was referring to, and it looks like the author just noticed this thread: https://github.com/nkuntz1934/matrix-workers/commit/0823b47c...

Days after the fake story about Cursor building a web browser from scratch with GPT-5.2 was debunked. Disbelief should be the default reaction to stories like this.

  • Btw, after I wrote that initial article ("Cursor's latest "browser experiment" implied success without evidence"), I gave it my own try to write a browser from scratch with just one agent, using no 3rd party crates, only commonly available system libraries, and just made a Show HN about it: https://github.com/embedding-shapes/one-agent-one-browser

    • Yes, this is what Ai assisted coding is good at.

      A poc that would usually take a team of engineers weeks to make because of lack of cross disciplinary skills can now be done by one at the cost of long term tech debt because of lack of cross disciplinary knowledge.

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    • Would be interested to know what people think of the locking implementation for the net worker pool.

      I’m no expert but it seems like a strange choice to me - using a mutex around an MPSC receiver, so whoever locks first gets to block until they get a message.

      Is that not introducing unnecessary contention? It wouldn’t be that hard to just retain a sender for each worker and just round robin them

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  • The outrageous part of this is nowhere in the blog post or the repository indicates it's vibe coded garbage (hopefully I didn't miss it?). You expect some level of bullshit in AI company's latest AI vibe coding announcements. This can be mistaken for a classical blog post.

    Although the tell is obvious if you spent one second looking at https://github.com/nkuntz1934/matrix-workers. That misaligned ASCII diagram, damn.

    Why is Cloudflare paying this guy again, just to vibe a bunch of garbage without even checking above the fold content in the README?

    • > Why is Cloudflare paying this guy again

      Perhaps usage of AI is a performance target he's being judged against, like at many tech companies today.

    • > A production-grade Matrix homeserver implementation

      It's getting outright frustrating to deal with this.

      Fine, random hype-men gets hyped about stuff and tweets about it, doesn't mind me too much.

      Huge companies who used to have a lot of good will putting out stuff like this, seemingly with absolutely zero reviews before hitting publish? What are they doing? Have everyone decided to just give up and give in to the slop? We need "engineering" to make a comeback.

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  • I get vibe coding a feature or news story or whatnot but how do you go about not even checking if the thing actually works, or fact checking the blog post?

    • Optics is the only thing that matters, there are people genuinely pushing for vibe coding on production systems. Actually, all of the big companies are doing this and claiming it is MORE safe because reduces human error.

      I'm starting to believe they are all right, actually. Maybe frontier models surpassed most humans, but the bar we should have for humans is really really low. I genuinely believe most people cannot distinguish llms capabilities from their own capabilities, and their are not wrong from the perspective they have.

      How could you perceive, out in the wild, an essence that scapes you?

  • it seems as if literally everyone associated with "AI" is a grifter, shill (sorry, "Independent Researcher"), temporarily embarrassed billionaire, or just a flat out scammer

    I have yet to see a counter-example

    • I would not rule out that sometimes they are just incompetent and believe their own story, because they just don't know it better. Seems this is called a "bad apple"?

    • Everyone (not really, but basically yes) associated with $current_thing is a rent seeking scammer.

      Even if Blockchain has tremendous impact, even if transformers are incredible (really) technology, even if NFTs could solve real world problems...you could basically say the same thing and be right, rounding up, 100% of the time, about anything technology related (and everything else as well). This truly is a clown world, but it is illegal to challenge it (or considered bad faith around here)

  • It's clear that on Hacker News many people have made absurdly deep investments into this "technology." There's going to be a long period of pearl clutching we have to dig out of until we get back to the standard hacker ethic of not believing anything published by corporations.

  • They did build a browser; it may not be a very compliant or complete browser, or even a useful one, but neither was IE6!

It is worrying to see a major vendor release code that does not actually work just to sell a new product. When companies pretend that complex engineering is easy it makes it very hard for the rest of us to explain why building safe software takes time. This kind of behavior erodes the trust that we place in their platform.

  • The real concern is that we've been doing this race to the bottom for so long that it's becoming almost trivial to explain why they are wrong. This over simplification has existed before AI coding and it's the dream AI coding took advantage of. But this market of lemons got too greedy

Bloody hell that's embarrassing, for both Cloudflare and the blog author. Did he not have anyone review it before publishing?

So many failures coming out of Cloudflare these days, feels like they peaked a while ago and are slowly declining into incompetence.

Honestly I like Cloudflare's CDN and DNS but beyond that I don't really trust much else from them. In the past though their blog has been one of the best in the space and the information has been pretty useful, almost being a gold standard for postmortems, but this seems especially bad. Definitely out of line compared to the rest of their posts. And with the recent Cursor debacle this doesn't help. I also don't really get their current obsession with porting every piece of software on Earth to Workers recently...

  • >I also don't really get their current obsession with porting every piece of software on Earth to Workers recently...

    Because their CDN/DNS is excellent software but it's not massive moat. Workers on other hand is.

    It's like difference between running something on Kubernetes vs Lambdas. One you can somewhat pivot with between vendors vs other one requires massive rewrites to software that means most executives won't transition away from it due to high potential for failure.

  • Yeah, I like that I can just upload a static html and host it there for free, but anything more I dunno. Its all about vendor lock-in with their products.

    • I essentially just use them for this and domain DNS/Registrar as their pricing is pretty good for that.

  • I guess it depends on the author. Seems like it is the first post for this author, and given the reception, maybe the last one...

I hope this isn't in bad taste, but I applied for the editor-in-chief position at Cloudflare back in August when they had it open. I'm still very interested in the role. If anyone at cf is reading this, my email is bro @ website in bio.

Blog post now says: "* This post was updated at 11:15 a.m. Pacific time to clarify that the use case described here is a proof of concept. Some sections have been updated for clarity." But parts of it are still misleading.

I've never thought someone should be fired based on a blog post but man, this comes real close.

  • This appears to be the author's first blog post for Cloudflare, Cloudflare being the author's first post-military employer. For his sake and Cloudflare's, this deserves an AAR that I hope becomes a teachable moment for both.

“This architecture shifts the paradigm for self-hosting. It turns "running a server" from a chore into a utility. You get the sovereignty of owning your data without the burden of owning the infrastructure”

Yeah, this is just shameful. Obviously written by an LLM with zero oversight. If this engineer doesn't get fired I'll lose all trust in Cloudflare.

It’s not a working or complete implementation, but…

  • But according to the README, it is production grade! Presumably "production" in this case is an isolated proof of concept?

  • Well that is an interesting idea and proof of concept. I agree that the post is not the best I have seen from Cloudflare, and it shouldn't suggest that the code is production ready, but it is an interesting use-case.

The developer just "cleaned up the code comments", i.e. they removed all TODOs from the code: https://github.com/nkuntz1934/matrix-workers/commit/2d3969dd...

Professionalism at its finest!

Did they really vibe code a partial implementation and blog about it?

That's one way to destroy the CF blog credibility!

nkuntz1934 Senior Engineering TPM @ Cloudflare

Of course, this is done by a manager. Classic corporate mindset, I can do what these smelly nerds do every day, hold my bear.

He doesn't even know how git works, huh?

What a clown.

  • TPM isn't manager. It's basically a PM, but they're (supposed) to be technical

    • My guess, a program manager high up in the engineering org and not a people manager. But suggesting a high up program manager doesn't direct people is also wrong. TPMs "make the wheels go 'round" in engineering. They very much control the fate of other individual, and often whole teams so their integrity and capability both matter considerably which means they should not be passing themselves off as a coder or their individual code projects as production ready.

Um what's up with companies trying to recreate really big projects using vibe coding.

Like okay, I am an indie-dev if I create a vibe coded project, I create it for fun (I burn VC money of other people doing so tho but I would consider it actually positive)

But what's up with large companies who can actually freaking sponsor a human to do work make use of AI agents vibe code.

First it was cursor who spent almost 3-5 million$ (Just came here after watching a good yt video about it) and now Cloudflare.

Like, large corpos, if you are so much interested in burning money, atleast burn it on something new (perhaps its a good critique of the browser thing by Cursor but yeah)

I am recently in touch with a person from UK (who sadly got disabled due to an accident when he was young) guy who is a VPS provider who got really impacted by WHMCS increase in bill and He migrated to 1200 euros hostbill. Show him some HN love (https://xhosts.uk/)

I had vibe coded a golang alternative. Currently running it in background to create it better for his use cases and probably gonna open source it.

The thing with WHMCS alternatives are is that I made one using gvisor+tmate but most should/have to build on top of KVM/QEMU directly. I do feel that WHMCS is definitely one of the most rent seeking project and actually writing a golang alternative of it feels sense (atleast to me)

Can there not be an AI agent which can freaking detect what people are being charged for (unfairly) online & these large companies who want to build things can create open source alternatives of it.

I mean I am not saying that it stops being slop but it just feels a good way of making use of this tech aside from creating complete spaggeti slop nobody wants, I mean maybe it was an experiment but now it got failed (Cursor and this)

A bit ironic because I contacted the xhosts.uk provider because I wanted to create a cloudflare tunnels alternative after seeing 12% of internet casually going through cf & I saw myself being very heavily reliant on it for my projects & I wasn't really happy about my reliance on cf tunnels ig

[flagged]

  • I also can't help but feel bad for the author. However, when the first line of the README is

    > A production-grade Matrix homeserver

    this is engineering malpractice. It is also unethical to present the work of an LLM as your own.

  • I think it's a pretty big deal for a major company to put out a blog post about something that is "production grade" and pushing customers to use it without actually making it production grade.

  • > They start by saying they "wanted to see if it was possible"

    That's a generous read. From the actual article:

    > We wanted to see if we could eliminate that tax entirely. Spoiler: We could.

  • We are getting tired of being lied to.

    • The person who wrote the article probably does not benefit from lying, I don't think it was the intent. It is a bad post, don't get me wrong, but maybe there is no need to insult the author just for that.

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