Cloudflare doesn’t have AI psychosis. It has a thesis.

A Hacker News essay titled "Cloudflare's AI psychosis" drew front-page attention over the weekend, arguing that Cloudflare has shifted from "boring infrastructure run by engineers" to a product-management organization with overlapping primitives, no proper Postgres, delayed observability, more outages, and 1,100 layoffs under an "agentic" banner. A responding writer agreed with most of the essay's list of complaints but argued its diagnosis is wrong, saying the piece is being circulated as if the two were the same thing.

“I am not blaming the innovation. I am blaming the chaos of innovation. Everything feels DISJOINTED.” That’s the author of “Cloudflare’s AI psychosis”, on Hacker News this weekend, after the essay reached the front page. The essay itself is wider and angrier than that. Cloudflare used to be boring infrastructure run by engineers and is now a product-management organisation with a posting habit; too many overlapping primitives, still no proper Postgres, a developer experience bolted on as an afterthought, observability that never ships, more outages than ever, 1,100 people made redundant under an “agentic” banner. It opens by missing the old company, the one that “sat in front of your site, ate the attacks, cached the static stuff, did the DNS, and that’s it. No BS.” I agree with most of what it lists. I think the diagnosis is wrong, and I want to say why at some length, because the essay is being passed around as if the two were the same thing.