Cloudflare CTO Predicts Coding AIs Will Bring More Productivity, Urges 'Data Fluidity'

Serverless JavaScript is hosted in an edge network or by an HTTP caching service (and only runs when requested), explains Cloudflare. "Developers can write and deploy JavaScript functions that process HTTP requests before they travel all the way to the origin server."

Their platform for serverless JavaScript will soon have built-in AI features, Cloudflare's CTO announced today, "so that developers have a rich toolset at their disposal. A developer platform without AI isn't going to be much use. It'll be a bit like a developer platform that can't do floating point arithmetic, or handle a list of data. We're going to see every developer platform have AI capability built in because these capabilities will allow developers to make richer experiences for users...

As I look back at 40 years of my programming life, I haven't been this excited about a new technology... ever. That's because AI is going to be a pervasive change to how programs get written, who writes programs and how all of us interact with software... I think it'll make us more productive and make more people programmers.
But in addition, developers on the platform will also be able to train and upload their own models to run on Cloudflare's global network: Unlike a database where data might largely be stored and accessed infrequently, AI systems are alive with moving data. To accommodate that, platforms need to stop treating data as something to lock in developers with. Data needs to be free to move from system to system, from platform to platform, without transfer fees, egress or other nonsense. If we want a world of AI, we need a world of data fluidity.

So it's a cloud platform

[RightwingNutjob]

And the cloud might rewrite your code for you.

Meh. Could be useful in some contexts. Could be dealbreakingly dangerous in other contexts. Mostly around financial or hippa stuff with mandatory data security and integrity reqs.

Almost certainly not the second coming of Elvis. Or that other dude.

Re:

[leptons]

Why do you write pointless comments? Do you really have nothing better to do with your time? This comment is pointless too, but I have plenty of time.

Re:

[gweihir]

I have some experience with website-rewriting in a proxy-context, including some limited JavaScript rewriting. My observations even with a clearly restricted set of web-application (intranet of a large bank), getting this to work took over a year, because there are so many special cases, incorrect HTML and JavaScript, server behaving not like they should, including RFC violations and plain broken content being delivered that somehow, with some browsers still displayed as intended.

My conclusion is to never,

Re:

[Bu11etmagnet]

> not the second coming of Elvis. Or that other dude.

Costello?

Re: So it's a cloud platform

[RightwingNutjob]

I keep telling you Idunno's on third!

Re:

[backslashdot]

The data format. Just because a file has XML tags doesn't mean it can't identify as JSON. Not all .xml files are XML and not all .json files are JSON. What's so hard about that to get?

salad.xml.json: /_?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>{"/_fruit/>":["/_apple/>","/_orange/>"]}

What? Slashdot's comment system is html-phobic and allow html/xml tags so I can't show it properly. If your parser can't parse it it's because it is unnecessarily strict.

Re:

[F.Ultra]

How on earth did you both misgender and misname Jordan Peterson?

Re:

[narcc]

What? Slashdot's comment system is html-phobic and allow html/xml tags so I can't show it properly.

Slashdot's comment system isn't the problem:

salad.xml.json: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>{"<fruit/>":["<apple/>","<orange/>"]}

See? It's not that hard.

Predicts Coding AIs Will Bring More Productivity.

[oldgraybeard]

Duh! and lower costs due to fewer actual programmers involved.

Re:Predicts Coding AIs Will Bring More Productivit

[oldgraybeard]

Oh forgot 'Data Fluidity' whats that? Fancy talk for easy to steal?

It's not good enough

[Baron_Yam]

Until it's actually intelligent, or we have incredibly standard code objects that can be assembled without any intelligent oversight, nothing an 'AI' churns out will be trustworthy without being properly reviewed by a human.

And I don't know about most coders, but I can tell my own code from someone else's and it's a lot easier for me to review my own code long after I've forgotten writing it - I can figure out what it was meant to do and find where to add or subtract or correct for errors from some new use that didn't crop up in the original deployment and I failed to plan for, and I can figure it out pretty quickly. Someone else's code takes a while longer... and I see no reason why an AI's output wouldn't qualify as "someone else's code".

It might be a nice tool for hunting down already known problems with well-documented solutions that are either complete or fairly easy to plug in to something else. For anything complicated, I would never trust all the different blocks of code to play nicely with each other to a standard I'd sign off on without doing enough review I might as well just write it myself in the first place.

Then again, I've only ever worked on high-availability systems. Maybe there are a lot of error-tolerant business cases out there.

Re:

[Kaenneth]

I would like an AI code reviewer that can point out syntactically valid code that doesn't make sense.

I know of an API that shipped with a .equals and .notequals function that allowed for a pair of objects to both return equal and not equal at the same time due to a logical AND where an OR should have been.

Re:

[gweihir]

Indeed. Standard components on the level other engineering disciplines have are not to be expected anytime soon. AI that is actually intelligent (AGI) is not even on the distant horizon and may still well never happen at all. Nobody knows, but at this time there is not even a weak glimmer of actual general intelligence in these systems.

Also make that a "very competent human", because the code will look good while possibly being total crap with, worst case, difficult to spot but nonetheless severe problems.

Then again, I've only ever worked on high-availability systems. Maybe there are a lot of error-tolerant business cases out there.

T

AI will make more people programmers

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

and more real programmers redundant.

"Rich toolset", "richer experience"...

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Whenever a company issue a statement with that word in it, I instantly know it's been curated by the PR department and it's trying to bullshit you. I can't count the number of companies that promised a rich-something-or-other and ended up making boring ass products.

Re:

[iMadeGhostzilla]

The mark of the charlatan is he tells you about all the great things that will happen with none of the negatives.

As I look back at 40 years of my programming life, I have never seen this much charlatanism about a new technology... ever.

Re:

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Surely the dot-com bubble...

Re:

[postbigbang]

Cloudflare just wants to sell more serverless, lambda, and clean up stinky code. There isn't altruism here, it's a sales department.

CNCF benefits the Cloudians. More transactions==more revenue.

More revenues makes their Wall Street Overlords happier.

Every cloud company wants to balloon their revenue, and every balloon's skin gets thinner as it expands.

Re:

[narcc]

Did you miss the hype around OOP?

Re:

[gweihir]

Indeed. OOP must be the largest case of false advertising and broken promises ever. Sure, it has its place and some (few) languages actually get it right (Eiffel, Python), but forcing it in was perhaps the most productivity destroying move ever. It is most definitely not "one size fits all" and often its use is excessive (Java, I am looking at you) and causes significantly more problems than it solves. Although Artificial Ignorance may well be set to improve on that and become the new "most productivity-des

Re:

[narcc]

Funny thing, some students just tried to use ChatGPT to help them with a firewall configuration lab (they are allowed). Their verdict is "useless".

I suspect that this is going to become increasingly more common as the hype dies down.

Re:

[iMadeGhostzilla]

I don't remember any tech hype involved the general public to this extent. Dot com was mostly about everyone making money from it, Metaverse was a curiosity that fizzled quickly, and non-techies don't know about OOP to this day. Maybe AI has gotten attention because we'be been primed with Terminator 1..N over the decades.

Agree re OOP hype. This disctinction about understanding non-OOP vs OOP code was nicely made in Jim Coplien's "Why Most Unit Testing Is Waste":

"... Unit testing was a staple of the FORTRAN

Re:

[narcc]

Thanks for that recommendation. I don't know how that article escaped my notice for this long.

Re:

[coofercat]

In the AI world a "rich toolset" most likely doesn't include any form of automated testing. Most of the cloudy serverless function style services have pretty shoddy testing capabilities, if they have any at all. You just have to run it up and see if it works in your browser, and that's about it.

Show, don't tell...like FF: Spirits Within

[Somervillain]

Cloudflare sucks. They don't even lead their market. It's like if HP CTO said he AI was going to bring a revolution in laptops. This is nonsense vaporware. If they had a good use for their AI, they wouldn't be telling you about it, they'd be showing it. This is just a flailing company desperate to get in the news. When you show me your cool edge platform that will use AI to eliminate the need for origin requests (and actually work reliably)...then I'll change my tune. Slashdot needs to demand that ALL AI news stories show actual case studies.

If AI could take my job, it would be actually happening right now. CTOs wouldn't be making promises, they'd be apologizing for slashing their workforces or bragging about how their existing workforces can handle 10x the workload with their AI assistants. Software engineers are really really really expensive. And the companies working on AI have a LOT of cash to play with and have sunk billions into it. They have the motivation. They have the funding. They have access to the best technology of today. It it could be done, they would have done it already and would be profiting immensely.

This reminds me of "Final Fantasy: Spirits Within" For the young ones, back in 2001, FF:SW was the GREATEST CGI anyone had ever seen. It was certainly the best 2001 had to offer. However, the parallel is that Sony pictures hyped up their stupid film and said someday we'd have "Virtual Actors." They claimed their CGI was so good they could replace actors...just like how these shit AI companies claim they can replace software engineers, paralegals, etc. They were actually thinking they'd release newer versions of a specific actor...as an actual program, and FF:SW was version 1.0 of the star. It obviously never happened. I view generative AI like CGI. It will revolutionize the industry and enable new capabilities...but CGI won't replace actors. It won't replace practical effects. It won't replace sets. As we've seen over 30 years, CGI has become integrated with conventional moviemaking technology and enhances it. I think generative AI will do the same for any industries it is applicable for. Programmers will probably be aided by generative AI in the near future, but it won't replace your freaking origin server. It won't replace your engineering staff.

Re:

[gweihir]

If AI could take my job, it would be actually happening right now. CTOs wouldn't be making promises, they'd be apologizing for slashing their workforces or bragging about how their existing workforces can handle 10x the workload with their AI assistants. Software engineers are really really really expensive. And the companies working on AI have a LOT of cash to play with and have sunk billions into it. They have the motivation. They have the funding. They have access to the best technology of today. It it could be done, they would have done it already and would be profiting immensely.

Indeed. The fact of the matter is that you cannot replace good programmers and real software engineers with AI as currently available. Well, you can, but the results will probably cost you a lot more business than you can afford to lose.

That said, even the moron-level AI currently available will take quite a few white-colar jobs despite its complete lack of understanding and insight. Think customer support for insurance and banks, for example. A lot of that is just people having trouble with the web-interfa

Re:

[avandesande]

The whole 'AI is dangerous and will take peoples jobs' is just viral marketing.

Still waiting for natives JS blockchain features

[thesjaakspoiler]

I can't understand why people think we can still live without a blockchain for everything we do with JS.
Even something as simple as handling a click deserves an implementation with a blockchain because you never know if that click was really a click.

These cunts already think they're internet sheriff

[waspleg]

s. They will refuse to deliver content to browsers they don't like. I don't even trust them to do what they're doing much less with some "AI" trash to steal trade secrets. Fuck this noise.

That souds like an absolute nightmare

[gweihir]

Security, reliability and maintainability with this will probably be something that only absolute experts can still manage somewhat, i.e. most people will not be able to. A case where more functionality is the very opposite of an advantage.

In the end this will probably only allow Cloudflare to mess with applications, because nobody can really use it. And forget about moving to another provider.

Debugging

[0xG]

Maybe we should get the ai to do the debugging.
It would probably be better at that anyways, and nobody really likes doing it.

AI and profit = unreadable code

[sapgau]

Lets not forget that AI is trained on the selected sources you provide it.
If my sources favour obfuscated code and only that AI can make changes then I have to pay a premium to maintain that code.
I think the current expectation is that AI will write clear elegant code. But that will go against keeping you as a customer. I think greed will force AI to create a lot of obfuscated code.