Hi, everyone. We're at AI Engineers Europe in London with all of the Cloudflare lads. Woo. Cloudflare. Sunil Thomas and Matt. Okay. So I guess the question I wanna ask you guys what you're excited about at the conference and just in general with AI engineering?
Oh, the conference has been awesome. Like, you look around the room and you're like, oh my god. These are people that I vaguely recognize from online who have done, like, really cool cool stuff over the past few years. We have the Open Claw guy. We have we have Peter. We have the pie guy. Yeah. There's, like, loads of people that you look around, like, oh my god. That's sick. And the talks have been really, really good. Yeah.
Yeah. I'd agree with that. I was sharing some of my dumb side projects, and I was like, oh, what so what have you made? He's like, I made flask. I'm like, oh. I'm like, okay. Sorry? Well, like, No, it's been
nice because this has been the takeover from the Viennese School of Coding. So, Arindel and Pai, everyone wants to be friends with them right now. And they are extremely how do I put this? Very European. Like, they don't do well with fame.
Like, but it's fun. For me, the big highlight about AI engineer, other than the great talks and the companies and individuals, is the quality of gossip is incredible. Hearing about what's happening in the AI, like, back channels, who's bullshitting ARRs, all of that, speed, how amazing.
I mean
Oh, nothing that I'm going to say on Vineyard is it's gossip for a reason. But if there's one good reason to show up no. The point I'm making is I think gossip is a leading indicator of how good a conference is. If you don't have good sources of gossip, that means the attendance is not good. You're like nobody who's connected with the industry. It's been amazing. I like it.
Okay. Are we good again? No.
But seriously, it's been good. I think I was see I was worried about an eight track conference. It's been a while since I've done one of those, but it's just jam packed with everyone that you know. It's not there there's like no filler. It's all killer. It's amazing conference.
Amazing. Okay. What technologies are you excited about in particular? I know, like, Sunil, you did your talk on code mode, and I know, Matt, you're doing I've missed your one. But
MCP in code mode. MCP
in code mode. And Thomas is also very excited about we the separate thing that we've been we're gonna come to. But
I've got two things I'd like to shout out. First is PyAgent. That's like my agent coding agent of choice now. It's just insanely fast and simple and, like, the things you can build with it. You can build the same things as core code and open code, but if you want a good time, use PyAgent.
And then the second thing is being able to, like, remote bash into your home lab and stick that behind MCP and play it in your Clord code is really powerful. Have a open source package for Barry that lets you do this secured by Cloudflare, but it's kind of use that as inspiration and, like, expose all your computers at home to Clord and, like, build things.
Thomas was telling me, he was like, this is this thing is so awesome. This thing is so awesome. Like, look. I'm just in the Claude app, and I'm using my Nord, like, Claude subscription or whatever, and I can I have this persistent sandbox that is my Raspberry Pi in my bedroom? I And was like, that's cool. He's like, oh, yeah. I was like, what what could it do that, like, quad code can't or whatever he said? No. No. No.
But it's like, it's persistent. Like, I can just leave, go on to another machine, do everything, and it's like, it's still there. It's still there. And I was like, oh, we should we should we should test that. We should make a we should try and slot fork DD, the the disk library in should we just try slot fork that in in Zig and just, like, do that like, do something silly with that?
And it was kind of a joke by me, but he tried it. And It just works. It works. You can do in Clorox, Cody. You can do via Barry. Via Barry.
Two things, by the way. You cannot have Cloudflare people with a mic in front of them and not talk about slop folks. Are you just our brand now, apparently? Second, am I right that your partner keeps disconnecting it to put the kettle on?
Not to put the kettle on. Just when she wants to plug her laptop in. So I'm on top of my pie from the USB C connection. I'm like, no. So hopefully, that doesn't happen today when I'm showing people it.
Oh, another thing. By the way, we have been trying to bully Mario into making sure that the Pi coding agent runs natively on workers. Like, not even in container. We are gonna make it work on, like, Cloudflare Worker.
I am so excited. Yeah.
Yeah. It's gonna be good.
The thing I'm really impressed about with Pi is, like, the TUI is amazing. Yeah. Like, the TUI, like, the terminal interface is so, so good. And I just like this is insane. Cord code has been glitchy for ages. OpenCode, they made a whole new, like, TUI experience. And Pis, it's just I don't even know how you made it. It's just it's just sick. It's awesome. It's so small as well, the library. I I I think people anyone making a coding agent should steal Pis2e's.
Besides not being glitchy, what what do you like about that? Smooth. You can scroll.
I mean, it sounds like a given, but it's really not.
Yeah. Yeah. It's so the entire philosophy of Py is that it does very, very little. Like, it has, like, four tools. What? Read, write, bash Edit. Edit. And it has this concept of extensions where if you want to add a feature to the coding agent, you just tell it to build it itself. Incredible. Just a This is
an emergent feature of getting us all on the show is we're just gonna show Pi to you for Oh, thanks. That's great.
I mean, I love Pi. Like, I do think it's the best named coding agent. Of course.
Sunil, famously, 3.1. I know.
Yeah. Every six months, somebody realizes. They're like, oh, that's why your Twitter handle is three point one. Yeah. Like friends and family, they're like, uh-huh. Is that what you're doing?
I think I was also slow. Took me took me
way too long.
Yeah. Yeah. But that's also something about how you've been doing, like, code mode and the MCP's that, Matt, you felt of, like, that kind of simple interface.
I guess, like, the idea of code mode is that we just let the model write code, and we try and reduce the amount of static tools that we expose to the model because everyone adds context normally in in each agent. And instead of that, we just expose normally that one code tool or, like, you can name it whatever you want. And just let the model write code against an API and external service, like, whatever you want. Just let the model write code.
Yeah. Is it it feels like is this kind of a is there, like, some kind of agent experience, developer experience principles in there, in a way?
100%. We were just talking about this, that the next billion, trillion users, they don't interact with you either via UI or even via tool calls. The things that they want to do is to write code against your system. The thing I was talking about in my talk that I said in my talk yesterday was, as programmers, this is already how we interact with computers. Like, the example I like giving is, somebody gives you 500 photos from a wedding, and says, can you just label this and give captions to all of it?
You're like, nope, no problem, Node. Js, write a script, use a vision model, do captions. Regular users have not had access to this kind of power before, and now they do. So where does that code run safely? Was I telling you about this?
For the last thirty years, we have been told to never evaluate a random code. Yeah. Which means there's this entire branch of the tech tree that's been, like, unexplored. So this is, like, day one for, like, code mode, and we we suspect that there's no way that it remains a Cloudflare only thing. I suspect every provider is going to be this.
Well, we borrowed the idea also from from Apple originally. Like, there was a there was a yeah. Was codec paper called something like let it wasn't called let the model write code, but it was called something around that where they they they were getting the model to write Python, and then they were evaluating the Python as the output. So it wasn't exactly the same. It wasn't through a tool call.
It was, like, pre open source models being really good at tool calling actually. And it was pre them being really good at Python actually, so it was quite rubbish. But I think now all the foundational models are good enough that doing all of this through a tool pool is amazing.
Yeah. And, Thomas, you're working on observability at Cloudflare. Are you seeing the same are you thinking about the same stuff?
Yeah. So working on observability at Cloudflare is interesting. You get have to touch, like, a a ton of different repos at Cloudflare. You have to add things to work a d r runtime. You have to add things to our control planes.
You have to add things to our data repos. And historically, contributing to all of these has been quite hard and, a slow process. And now the ability to go, like, hey. Make a PRT this repo doing x, y, and zed is so easy that then the hard part has become being trusted to contribute to these repos and then finding people and they like, building relationships with the maintainers of these repos. So that's kind of the key thing for me right now is just, like, being nice to people and, like, trying to make them my friends and being like, please,
can you merge my PR? It's really important for this feature we're working
We're we're all learning from
the school of Sunil about
You say that, but Tom is famously easily top five nicest people in Cloudflare. Oh. And I'm telling you, there's no one from management in that list. No.
Yeah. The Sunil School. I like that.
I like it. I do love taking credit for your personality. I
was more thinking the Sun Else
School of favors. Oh, favors. Exactly. I I love collecting favors. Yeah. That's What's the secrets with favor with favors?
Oh, that's easy. You should never use a favor that you get for yourself. You use it for someone else because then that person owes you a favor. But then the moment that someone tries to cancel your ass on a Sunday night on Twitter, they all show up to, like, support. That is the you always use your favors for other people.
Yeah. You you wouldn't have any experience with that, though. Right?
Oh, no. It was purely hypothetical. I was completely hypothetical. I'm just saying, it might happen to you someday. I don't know. I was trying to explain to people that I have no beef with anyone because I'm Hindu. So I don't I don't do beef.
Okay. There we have the opening snippet. This is why someone thought you were vegetarian. I know for the longest time. I was like, no. I love steak, bro. Okay. Amazing. And then just kind of tying it together, like, the MCVs with and code mode with observability, that's something that's like where there's, like, massive amounts of data and context and stuff. Like, is there something that you kind of think about together, and, like, are there any things that
Oh, you you you that's how we are going to establish the loop. Right? Yeah. That's how, like, you connect the entire loop, and you have, like, self healing infrastructure, self adjusting infrastructure. You don't have to worry about some kid making the wrong config change at like three in the morning. And you now have to like so Cloudflare does a lot of things at scale, but we now have to tolerate our own scale back at us. It's like the planetary computer is going to start attacking itself. I'm
that's the story, I
think, that ties, like, code mode, MCP, observability, and all the other things we're doing in Cloudflare. We're just finishing the loop.
And I think my team, we're behind here, and we need to catch up. So I think you're gonna see a lot of things from the observability at Cloudflare's team this year. We're we're gonna be Next week, in fact.
Aren't we shipping some things next week too?
I don't know.
I hope. Oh, we are on camera. That's right. We're like,
oh, sorry.
Maybe. Maybe we some things next week. I don't maybe.
Yeah. Well, I heard you guys, like it's always like the clues are there, isn't it? Like, you're not we think there was someone from Cloudflare said that.
We have the person on Twitter who keeps on who has, like, reengineered our feature flags.
Jane Wong. I love her. She's amazing.
She is amazing. But Shout out, Jane. Yeah. The week before we have any big releases, there are spoil some spoilers, small spoilers. But the the good thing about how we do releases at Cloudflare is we we normally collect a huge amount of releases into a short period of time, and so it's sort of like rapid fire. Like, we can't. She only gets a few of them. There are many more still to come.
It's so fun. By the way, that's just it. Internally, there are you know, there are a couple of people who are, like, mad that it got leaked, and we're like, dude, Jane is awesome. You we should do better if we want to hide it from her. But otherwise, I mean, like, I I think we're trying to maybe we should just hire her. Like, I mean, we are a security company after all. Like, maybe she should be, like, on the payroll. But, anyway but, yeah, like, things things get leaked. That's fine.
Yeah. Amazing. Okay. What else are you excited to talk about? This what what what do you wanna say to the people? I feel like there's lots of interesting stuff that's that you guys are working on or thinking about that a lot of others are not.
Build dumb things. Yeah. If someone builds something and you go, wow. That's so smart. How could I build it? Build a dumber version and just put it out there and, like, try and do things with it. I built a dumb version of Matt's MTP server, and it works so well. And it's really insecure, and you shouldn't use it. But it does work very well.
Yeah. I man, Thomas has shown me so much cool stuff. How just getting rid of complexity. I I think I know if we're in a lucky mow moment where, like, that is a superpower, but I do think as the models get smarter as well, like, if you want your stuff to still be around I've been burned every six months every three months, I think, for the last, like, four years. As as the models get better Yeah.
If your thing can be simpler, if your thing can be more interpretable, like, that is actually better. And so I know you said it a bit crassly, but I I fully
You gave me that advice on a very specific question I had, like, yesterday. You were like, don't overengineer this. Just like, their models are gonna get better. You're gonna have to throw it away. And
I I think pretty much everything I ever built before joining Cloudflare, I ever engineered for the models because they they just weren't good enough in that moment. It's very hard to build something and just, like, know that you're gonna finish it, and it's not gonna work. And that feels like a really weird moment. But I think now the foundation of models are so good that actually if it doesn't work, you should be trying to find a way to make it work while still keeping it as light as possible.
Yeah. I have two things. One is I need people to start being original and courageous. Like, don't do an incremental like, stop trying to build SaaSes. Like, just be like super ambitious with like this new tech.
So the first thing I was like, oh, this is incredible new tech. You should absolutely dive into it and have a lot of fun. The second thing is it's worrying me that AI researchers with hundreds of millions of dollars are buying houses in New Zealand. Like, there's some an apocalypse coming, and they were going to the farthest edge of the planet. I can't reconcile the two at the moment.
It's a little scary. But until the world collapses, I think you should just, like, build dumb things. That'll be fun.
And fun things. Like,
more I
wanna see some more consumer stuff. Like, it is quite sad when you see someone, oh, and now we we built, like, b to b SaaS for dogs. It's like, please build something really cool.
Like, there there is so much wacky stuff around. Well, I gotta get you to try my whodunit party game. I I have an AI driven it's basically Clue, but with AI, and you you you have to find out who the murderer is. It's so fun. I'm having, like, a lot.
I so good. Like, I was showing a demo earlier of I basically like Sims, but they used a camera on the roof, and they were just tracking the person around the room. And so you could see, like, what everyone was in the room, and it was at a conference. No, man. And it was, like, projected on the wall, and it was just it literally looked like Sims. I was like, that is sick.
That's
dope. Like, we should do more, like, weird stuff like that.
Yeah. True. Yeah. That's a good one. Is that the closing line?
Yeah. Do dumb stuff. That's the Cloudflare line. Do dumb stuff. We we endorse that message.
On Cloudflare. Do dumb stuff on Cloudflare, would you say?
I mean, yeah. Like, it's you should absolutely put on Cloudflare. But just do dumb stuff. Yeah. Like, leave the hard stuff to us. As you can see, we are extremely serious professionals. We we we don't fuck around with these things. Like, you get to do the dumb stuff.
I was actually saying to Sunil Sunil, like, I feel like he's incredibly good at doing the pitch. Like but, like, you do it in a way where you want him to hear it because it's just so, like you wanna hear him say it because it's so, like, funny on his talk. Also, the haircut and the Okay. Line up. Yeah. They're looking very fresh. Mean, that's the that's the key to a good sales pitch. Yeah. Thanks so much, guys. Really fun.
Hey. Thanks for having us, man. It's
been Awesome. A