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.
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.
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.
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 don't know why it being potentially vibe coded or vibe written exonerates the author. "Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work [1]." It is your duty to ensure your work works, no matter what tools you used. You don't get to pass the blame on an AI agent any more than you get to blame intellij autocomplete for your buggy code.
Furthermore, I don't see why we are extending the principle of charity to cloudflare, a billion dollar enterprise controlling a significant part of internet traffic self identifying as a "utility." If cloudflare deserves more of something from us, it is scrutiny and accountability, not charity and deference.
My take has nothing to do with charity to Cloudflare, but to the author. I can't help remembering that quote from the 50's where an IBM exec said they weren't going to fire an employee who made a costly mistake for the company, they just spent $$$ training them.
I think it's fair to assume, given the historical quality of the CF blog, that this was a (big) mistake by an individual, and not "Cloudflare", as an entity, making this claim.
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.
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?
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
This project is awesome - it really does render HTML+CSS effectively using 20,000 lines of dependency-free Rust (albeit using system libraries for image rendering and fonts).
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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'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.
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
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)
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"?
I believe it was basically a broken, non-functioning wrapper around Servo internals. That’s what I’d expect from a high schooler who says “i wrote a web browser”, but not what I’d expect from a multi-billion dollar corporation.
> 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.
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.
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
Since cloudflare are busy editing this blog post to say something completely different from what it originally said, I feel that this archive link is relevant
Hah. The coward even deleted the telltale "not just X; Y" LLM dead-giveaway line from the blog, after someone vomit emoji quoted it in the mastodon thread.
“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.
He shouldn't get fired. For all we know he might actually be a decent employee who had a, ekhm, temporary lapse of reason. He didn't destroy anything (except damaging CF brand).
The best CF can do is to post a post-mortem and improve procedures so that can't happen anymore.
That the original post to HN linked in the blog was done on a throwaway kind of implies a level of awareness (on the part of the dev) that the code/claims were rubbish :)
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.
> Traditionally, operating a Matrix homeserver has meant accepting a heavy operational burden. You aren't just installing software; you are becoming a system administrator. You have to provision virtual private servers (VPS), tune PostgreSQL for heavy write loads, manage Redis for caching, configure reverse proxies, and handle rotation for TLS certificates. It’s a stateful, heavy beast that demands to be fed time and money, whether you are sending one message a day or one million.
I have limited experience with Matrix, but you don't actually need Synapse (reference homeserver) which is quite a resource hog and not even remotely easy to setup/administer.
You can just use the lightweight Continuwuity homeserver for the Matrix part, and Caddy for the reverse proxy/TLS/ACME part, installed on a VPS. Both require minimal configuration, and provide packages for many Linux distributions, as well as Docker images.
(Continuwuity is a fork of conduwuit which was a fork of Conduit. Conduit was abandoned, but is now active again, and there are also other active forks as well. However, it seems to me that Continuwuity is currently the most active fork.)
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.
Wildebeest ceased maintenance one month after the article's publication, adding a similar comment several months later[1]:
> :warning: This project has been archived and is no longer actively maintained or supported. Feel free to for this repository, explore the codebase, and adapt it to your needs. Wildebeest was an opportunity to showcase our technology stack's power and versatility and prove how anyone can use Cloudflare to build larger applications that involve multiple systems and complex requirements.
I don't know why cloudflare jumps on any bandwagon with a cloudflare workers version rather then implementing the "classics", like a blog or a forum that you can host with cloudflare workers.
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
LLMs made them twice as efficient: with just one release, they're burning tokens and their reputation.
It's kinda mindblowing. What even is the purpose of this? It's not like this is some post on the vibecoding subreddit, this is fricken Cloudflare. Like... What the hell is going on in there?
To be honest sometimes on my hobby project I don’t commit anything in the beginning (I know not great strategy) and then just dump everything in one large commit.
I think that's a reasonable heuristic, but I have projects where I primarily commit to an internal Gitea instance, and then sometimes commit to a public GitHub repo. I don't want people to see me stumbling around in my own code until I think it's somewhat clean.
I usually work in branches in a private repo, squash and merge features / fixes in the private repo, and only merge the clean, verified, extensively tested merges back to public.
You don't need to see every single commit and the exact chronology of my work, snapshots is enough :)
DevSecOps Engineer
United States Army Special Operations Command · Full-time
Jun 2022 - Jul 2025 · 3 yrs 2 mos
Honestly, it is a little scary to see someone with a serious DevSecOps background ship an AI project that looks this sloppy and unreviewed. It makes you question how much rigor and code quality made it into their earlier "mission critical" engineering work.
I don't know what's more embarrassing the deed itself, not recognizing the bullshit produced or the hastly attempt of a cover up. Not a good look for Cloudflare does nobody read the content they put out? You can just pretend to have done something and they will release it on their blog, yikes.
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.
what? that's like saying "you should implement TLS instead of HTTP"!
They do entirely different things: MLS is a key agreement protocol, equivalent to the Double Ratchet that Matrix uses for E2EE today. Matrix can use both.
MLS is an IETF standard. The server is easy to write, and easy to make scalable (no complicated merge algorithm required, unlike Matrix). Finally, individual chatrooms scale to an order of magnitude larger size vs. Matrix.
MLS is superior in every way to Matrix as it exists today if you need to implement encrypted chat rooms for your app.
Source: Guy who has implemented both, including extending Matrix to scale the server to Twitter scale (by, in essence, making it working like MLS, only worse due to the merge algorithm).
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 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.
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.
the reminder of "theres a human there" is not "defending" the actions. its a call back to reality, because people on the internet take little things way too fucking seriously all the time.
and yes, this is a little thing. extremely tiny. i promise you'll forget about it in a few days whenever the next thing in the outrage cycle bubbles to the top of your feed/HN
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.
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.
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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That's demonstrating expertise
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.
There was a third purpose (or perhaps a combination of those two): recruiting. There is a lot less recruiting happening these days.
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?
> How much longer are we going to accept that these are mistakes?
How much longer are shareholders** going to accept that these are mistakes?
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I don't know why it being potentially vibe coded or vibe written exonerates the author. "Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work [1]." It is your duty to ensure your work works, no matter what tools you used. You don't get to pass the blame on an AI agent any more than you get to blame intellij autocomplete for your buggy code.
Furthermore, I don't see why we are extending the principle of charity to cloudflare, a billion dollar enterprise controlling a significant part of internet traffic self identifying as a "utility." If cloudflare deserves more of something from us, it is scrutiny and accountability, not charity and deference.
[1] https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/18/code-proven-to-work/
My take has nothing to do with charity to Cloudflare, but to the author. I can't help remembering that quote from the 50's where an IBM exec said they weren't going to fire an employee who made a costly mistake for the company, they just spent $$$ training them.
I think it's fair to assume, given the historical quality of the CF blog, that this was a (big) mistake by an individual, and not "Cloudflare", as an entity, making this claim.
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I have heard that Cloudflare leadership (CEO/CTO) review every single blog post personally.
I doubt they checked the code though
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.
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?
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...
New damage control commit just came in, removing "production grade" from README, mentioning AI assistance, and fixing the misaligned ASCII diagram. https://github.com/nkuntz1934/matrix-workers/commit/fd412f41...
Should have just nuked the whole thing to be honest, the blog post and the repo.
Agreed. And the diagrams still lack substance, IMO.
Previously someone might sketch out a purposeful one in Monodraw or something (https://monodraw.helftone.com). But only when it adds value.
Now Claude shits out this vacuous nonsense by the bucketload———but it's some interconnected boxes in a code block in a readme, so it must be good.
Your commit is orphaned now; it seems he amended the log to a vague "Clean up code comments" to try to make the purpose less obvious: https://github.com/nkuntz1934/matrix-workers/commit/2d3969dd...
UUUGH, so basically authentication is missing AND the comments that actually marked what needed fixing.
Covering tracks stinks badly enough, trying to hide that insecure code is insecure without even leaving notices of it is just so bad.
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I wouldnt judge if he were to come clean and admit his AI slop. Instead he just makes it worse.
That honestly makes everything so much worse.
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
This project is awesome - it really does render HTML+CSS effectively using 20,000 lines of dependency-free Rust (albeit using system libraries for image rendering and fonts).
Here's a screenshot I took with it: https://bsky.app/profile/simonwillison.net/post/3mdg2oo6bms2...
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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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Congratulations: you've single-handedly managed to humiliate a $29 bil. poster child for code-slop!
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That's fairly impressive.
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?
[flagged]
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Army brain.
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.
In all seriousness Cloudflare was usually pretty good in terms of blog posts.
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 have a feeling that AI psychosis is more prevalent than we realize, especially in software.
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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)
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"?
I feel like there's a few people who just give too much benefit of the doubt because they're excited about the thing and hesitant to criticize.
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 didn't even compile, which makes me consider wether your comment is just ignorant or outright maliciously misleading
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I believe it was basically a broken, non-functioning wrapper around Servo internals. That’s what I’d expect from a high schooler who says “i wrote a web browser”, but not what I’d expect from a multi-billion dollar corporation.
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My understanding is that it doesn't even compile if you clone the repo.
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They didn't build a browser from scratch.
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?
Edited again at 11:45 to remove that as well. Now reads:
> I have been experimenting with the implementation and am excited for any contributions from others interested in this kind of service.
A few of the versions of the blog are available at: https://archive.ph/https://blog.cloudflare.com/serverless-ma...
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.
> Our team is using Matrix on Workers, handling real encrypted communications.
... Oh, dear.
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.
> So many failures coming out of Cloudflare these days
I wonder if there's a particular new fad that could be causing this
Hubris?
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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
Since cloudflare are busy editing this blog post to say something completely different from what it originally said, I feel that this archive link is relevant
https://archive.ph/AbxU5
Hah. The coward even deleted the telltale "not just X; Y" LLM dead-giveaway line from the blog, after someone vomit emoji quoted it in the mastodon thread.
This whole thing in a nutshell. Bold and sad to see this. Cloudflare has/had such outstanding posts that I really like/ed to read.
https://github.com/nkuntz1934/matrix-workers/commit/fd412f41...
“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.
He shouldn't get fired. For all we know he might actually be a decent employee who had a, ekhm, temporary lapse of reason. He didn't destroy anything (except damaging CF brand).
The best CF can do is to post a post-mortem and improve procedures so that can't happen anymore.
It's fine if they don't fire him but the damage to the Cloudflare brand is enough to make me look for alternatives where I can.
I love LLMs as much as the next guy, but it says something about Cloudflare if they allow engineers this reckless in their organization.
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That the original post to HN linked in the blog was done on a throwaway kind of implies a level of awareness (on the part of the dev) that the code/claims were rubbish :)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46780837
Not to mention they commented on their own post, pretending to ask a question..
I’ve posted a comment on this as Matrix at https://matrix.org/blog/2026/01/28/matrix-on-cloudflare-work... fwiw.
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.
Embarrassing, coming from a company like Cloudfare
Ahh, so that is what "shipping at the speed of inference" means
> Traditionally, operating a Matrix homeserver has meant accepting a heavy operational burden. You aren't just installing software; you are becoming a system administrator. You have to provision virtual private servers (VPS), tune PostgreSQL for heavy write loads, manage Redis for caching, configure reverse proxies, and handle rotation for TLS certificates. It’s a stateful, heavy beast that demands to be fed time and money, whether you are sending one message a day or one million.
I have limited experience with Matrix, but you don't actually need Synapse (reference homeserver) which is quite a resource hog and not even remotely easy to setup/administer.
You can just use the lightweight Continuwuity homeserver for the Matrix part, and Caddy for the reverse proxy/TLS/ACME part, installed on a VPS. Both require minimal configuration, and provide packages for many Linux distributions, as well as Docker images.
(Continuwuity is a fork of conduwuit which was a fork of Conduit. Conduit was abandoned, but is now active again, and there are also other active forks as well. However, it seems to me that Continuwuity is currently the most active fork.)
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...
Let's look back at 2023:
Welcome to Wildebeest: the Fediverse on Cloudflare https://blog.cloudflare.com/welcome-to-wildebeest-the-fedive...
Wildebeest ceased maintenance one month after the article's publication, adding a similar comment several months later[1]:
> :warning: This project has been archived and is no longer actively maintained or supported. Feel free to for this repository, explore the codebase, and adapt it to your needs. Wildebeest was an opportunity to showcase our technology stack's power and versatility and prove how anyone can use Cloudflare to build larger applications that involve multiple systems and complex requirements.
[1]: https://github.com/cloudflare/wildebeest/commit/b1be6a5c49be...
Claudflare?
Fraudfare
Clownflare
Not the first time Cloudflare has done this. Click around some of the docs for Realtime SFU, it's all AI slop. Hard to tell if anything is hallucinated or not. https://developers.cloudflare.com/realtime/sfu/sessions-trac...
The CEO of CloudFlare responded:
https://xcancel.com/eastdakota/status/2016357035064144309#m
> It’s a proof of concept. Get off your high horse.
I don't know why cloudflare jumps on any bandwagon with a cloudflare workers version rather then implementing the "classics", like a blog or a forum that you can host with cloudflare workers.
That seems to be written by AI
Author works in public sector... is this how Matrix works in classified environments? Seems dangerous
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
Did they really vibe code a partial implementation and blog about it?
That's one way to destroy the CF blog credibility!
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!
LLMs made them twice as efficient: with just one release, they're burning tokens and their reputation.
It's kinda mindblowing. What even is the purpose of this? It's not like this is some post on the vibecoding subreddit, this is fricken Cloudflare. Like... What the hell is going on in there?
I also use this as a simple heuristic:
https://github.com/nkuntz1934/matrix-workers/commits/main/
There exist only two commits. I've never seen a "real" project that looks like this.
To be honest sometimes on my hobby project I don’t commit anything in the beginning (I know not great strategy) and then just dump everything in one large commit.
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I think that's a reasonable heuristic, but I have projects where I primarily commit to an internal Gitea instance, and then sometimes commit to a public GitHub repo. I don't want people to see me stumbling around in my own code until I think it's somewhat clean.
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The repository is less than one week old though; having only the initial commit wouldn't shock me right away.
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I usually work in branches in a private repo, squash and merge features / fixes in the private repo, and only merge the clean, verified, extensively tested merges back to public.
You don't need to see every single commit and the exact chronology of my work, snapshots is enough :)
I might just make dummy commits ("asdadasdassadas") in the prototyping phase and then just squash everything to an "Initial commit" afterwards.
Oh wow I'm at a loss for words.
To the author: see my comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46782174, please also clean up that misaligned ASCII diagram at the top of the README, it's a dead tell.
Yeah deleting the TODOs like that is honestly a worse look.
Incoming force push to rewrite the history . Git doesn't lie!
I wouldn't put it past them...
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Reminds me of Cloudflare's OAuth library for Workers.
>Claude's output was thoroughly reviewed by Cloudflare engineers with careful attention paid to security
>To emphasize, this is not "vibe coded".
>Every line was thoroughly reviewed and cross-referenced with relevant RFCs, by security experts with previous experience with those RFCs.
...Some time later...
https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-4pc9-x2fx-p7vj
What is the learning here? There were humans involved in every step.
Things built with security in mind are not invulnerable, human written or otherwise.
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Here's the post on LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/nick-kuntz-61551869_building-...
https://www.linkedin.com/in/nick-kuntz-61551869/
DevSecOps Engineer United States Army Special Operations Command · Full-time
Jun 2022 - Jul 2025 · 3 yrs 2 mos
Honestly, it is a little scary to see someone with a serious DevSecOps background ship an AI project that looks this sloppy and unreviewed. It makes you question how much rigor and code quality made it into their earlier "mission critical" engineering work.
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I don't know what's more embarrassing the deed itself, not recognizing the bullshit produced or the hastly attempt of a cover up. Not a good look for Cloudflare does nobody read the content they put out? You can just pretend to have done something and they will release it on their blog, yikes.
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Wow this is definitely not a software engineer. Hmm I wonder if Git stores history...
they actually rewrote the history later, but github shows force push history too https://github.com/nkuntz1934/matrix-workers/activity?activi...
No more vulnerabilities then I guess!
they should have at least rebased it and removed from git history
Hilarious. Judging by the username, it's the same person who wrote the slop blog post, too.
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.
Wow. Does Cloudflare not review these before publication?
In 2026, you should be implementing MLS instead of Matrix.
what? that's like saying "you should implement TLS instead of HTTP"!
They do entirely different things: MLS is a key agreement protocol, equivalent to the Double Ratchet that Matrix uses for E2EE today. Matrix can use both.
Terrible analogy.
MLS is an IETF standard. The server is easy to write, and easy to make scalable (no complicated merge algorithm required, unlike Matrix). Finally, individual chatrooms scale to an order of magnitude larger size vs. Matrix.
MLS is superior in every way to Matrix as it exists today if you need to implement encrypted chat rooms for your app.
Source: Guy who has implemented both, including extending Matrix to scale the server to Twitter scale (by, in essence, making it working like MLS, only worse due to the merge algorithm).
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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 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.
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.
Does TPM not mean Technical Program Manager or Technical Product Manager?
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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.
> Is it really worth it?
Unequivocally yes.
Fraud is fraud, and if your first instinct is to defend it in this manner, check yourself in the mirror.
>if your first instinct is to defend it
the reminder of "theres a human there" is not "defending" the actions. its a call back to reality, because people on the internet take little things way too fucking seriously all the time.
and yes, this is a little thing. extremely tiny. i promise you'll forget about it in a few days whenever the next thing in the outrage cycle bubbles to the top of your feed/HN
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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.
Sure it's a bad post. But the guy did not make a nazi salute at a meeting...
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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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everybody is vibing everything now, code, messages, reviews, everything