When you look at the Cloudflare Developer Platform, you will quickly start drawing parallels between what Cloudflare provides and what the hyperscalers (such as AWS and Azure) provide. Sure, there are technical differences. However, you can build with the same basic primitives: Service Cloudflare AWS Azure GCP Compute Workers Lambda Functions Cloud Functions Database D1 Aurora S...
Today, I am continuing my deep-dive into every aspect of the Cloudflare Developer Platform by getting to grips with the AI inference capabilities of the platform. To do this, I’ve written a small AI Chat app that you can quickly deploy to your own Cloudflare dashboard if you like. Let’s take a look at some of the learnings today. My intent with todays investigation was to make an app that looks like one of the many public AI chat systems. I think that Google Gemini looks “the best” of t...
I’ve recently started working on bringing myself up to speed on the Cloudflare Dev Platform, which is a serverless development platform that runs your applications at the edge (and Cloudflare has more than 300 points of presence, so the edge is fairly spread out). This is the first in a series that will go through all the major features of the Cloudflare Dev Platform, but attempt to make some sense out of what each feature is best at and what works well together. Let’s say you are using C...
One of the best things about joining a new company is that you get to go to a series of training for that company. For Cloudflare, I get a technical bootcamp focused on Internet technologies. I learned Internet technologies a long time ago, so it’s a chance to catch up and immerse myself in the improvements that have happened along the way. My role recently has focused on developers (and it still does), but that doesn’t mean you should be oblivious to standard trouble shooting. Take DNS...
In my last three articles, I produced a set of recipes and rules for doing AI-first development using Spec-Driven Design. These rules really get you started in how to think about development when the coding (the easy part) is done for you. But how do you get started? When I am setting up a new project, my process has now changed. It starts off the same, but the additional files I need to write before I can start coding have changed. Here is what I do: 1. Scaffolding Inevitably, I hav...
This is the third and final part of my series on agentic engineering. If you want to read the first two articles, see the following links: Ten rules for spec-driven design Using Jobs-to-be-done to improve your agentic spec In the previous article, I covered the spec, which documents the “what” and the “why” of what you want to build using JTBD as a primary product requirements framework to use. This is recommeneded because the alternatives rely on a conversation between a product ma...
In my last article, I introduced ten rules to help you move from vibe-coder to AI Product Architect by building specs. However, I glossed over a few of the details. The basic problem is that most people write specs for themselves - a human. You aren’t writing for a human, so why do you think it would look the same? In this article, I’m going in depth into using product management techniques to write a spec that agents love. Rule 1 (refined) is “Don’t just tell the agent what to build; t...
Recently, I posted an article on the AI Maturity Model. In that article, I proposed six stages of growth - from tactician or accidental editor to the agentic engineer. The biggest difference between the vibe coder and the agentic engineer is the transition to spec-driven design. But what does that really mean? The “vibe-coder” sends one massive prompt and hopes for a miracle. The agentic engineer understands that an LLM is a reasoning engine, not a magician. Spec-driven design provides ...
I read a lot on the Internet from the prognosticators about whether AI is terrible or awesome - are we in a bubble or a revolution in the way we work? Why not both? Perhaps the best way to explain this is by - as everyone else is - drawing parallels to the other bubble / revolution that we all experienced - the dot-com crash of 2000. The year 2000 represents the moment where the financial excitement (the bubble) outpaced the actual infrastructure (the revolution). The Bubble: Financial ...
I have a confession to make. I don’t write code any more, and I haven’t written any code since August of last year. I wrote a little about my journey to AI nirvana (see my posts on AI Editors, OSS AI Editors, or SpecKit). I’m guessing that everyone goes through the same journey - from distrusting that AI will do a good job to using AI for everything. The good news is that software development has not really changed. The job was never about the code, even though the code was the tangible ...