Temporary Cloudflare Accounts for AI Agents

65 points42 comments7 hours ago
Hackbraten

Cloudflare: let's give the bots their own accounts so they can scrape harder.

Also Cloudflare: let's send normal humans who are trying to go about their daily lives into endless Turnstile spinner loops with absolutely zero recourse, grievance, or support infrastructure.

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simonw

Looks like Cloudflare still haven't shipped the most valuable possible feature for Cloudflare Workers though: hard billing caps.

I want to set a cap of $100/month and know, for sure, that if something untoward happens my apps will all stop serving traffic rather than me getting hit with a bill for $1000s.

The safest way to use Workers is on the free tier, which will shut off after 100,000 requests/day: https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/pricing/#...

simonw

Hot damn...

> Any agent can now run wrangler deploy --temporary and deploy a Worker to Cloudflare. This temporary deployment stays live for 60 minutes, during which time you can claim the temporary account, making it permanently your own. If you don't, it expires on its own.

Forget about agents, Cloudflare just provided free scratch deployments - ephemeral for 60 minutes - for anyone.

This is going to be amazing for things like PR previews and code review. Being able to deploy a preview to a working URL for free is a huge reduction in friction.

I hope it doesn't get abused so much that they turn it off again.

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piterrro

Lets keep in mind this is cloudflare workers runtime - it only makes sense to deploy small things there, maybe static sites. Unless the agent creates something for cf workers from scratch, asking it to „now deploy to cloudflare” will fail so bad.

This would only work if they would provision docker image deployment, similar to google cloud run, but the still, everything serveless has its own caveats…

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jsyang00

> Make snail-game in Cloudflare Worker in TypeScript and deploy it using wrangler, don't ask me questions, do the best you can

https://snail-game.solstice-barometer.workers.dev/

pretty cool.

derektank

Would love to know more about how Cloudflare plans to prevent abuse of ephemeral infrastructure to host malicious content. From elsewhere in their documentation, “Cloudflare limits how quickly you can create temporary preview accounts. If the Wrangler CLI cannot create an account because too many temporary preview accounts were requested too quickly, wait before retrying or authenticate the CLI with a permanent Cloudflare account,” and “Cloudflare applies additional abuse prevention checks to temporary preview accounts.”[1] This is a bit vague though. Creating a new account has never been a huge hurdle to overcome but this seems to reduce the barrier to entry even more.

[1] https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/claim-dep...

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anilgulecha

If eastdakota/jgc are here.

- simply expose containers to the world directly - without having to go via workers.

- You have other amazing parts of the stack anyway (D1, durable objects, a great object store). These aren't considered "lockin".

- workers is "lockin" - not similar enough to lambda/cloud functions and so becomes CF specific.

Not having a simple container based compute piece has made me hesitate in taking up CF. (Fly or firebase won out)

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aniviacat

Wouldn't it make more sense to merge the temporary account into an existing one, instead of claiming it as a new account?

This could lead to people having a large amount of separate accounts.

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827a

Correct me if I'm wrong, but does Cloudflare still not have a "Create Account" button on the account listing page? I think you still have to sign up from scratch doing plus-code email tricks, then invite your original email address as an admin, juggling multiple accounts. They should consider fixing that first.

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conception

I know no one is writing copy anymore but i wish they tried to edit it a bit so it wasn’t so glaringly obvious. It just sours the product when it seems like so little effort was put into the message. And it’s not even hard - just change the prompt used!

variety8675
soared

I’m going to need a wrapper for all these services offering this service.