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Comment by ttul | Hacker News Reader

That's not what I'm saying at all. I guarantee Cloudflare engineers are using coding agents every day for everything they do. The point is that discovering what you need to build comes only with the experience of operating at tremendous scale. I do not believe that someone could replicate what Cloudflare offers today just because they, say, have invested $20K/mo for 100x Claude Max plans, all of which are cranking 24x7.

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This is the SaaS advantage you can still have in an AI era. You can beat your competition by being exposed to more of the real world than them. For example, anyone can vibe code an accounting app, but no matter how good AIs get no vibe-coded AI app can have a track record of what happens in an complaince audit and whether it stood up during a tax audit from some particular jurisdiction. The real world will always be more complicated than an AI can vibe code a solution to, if for no other reason that as we advance in AI, the amount of stuff an AI needs to deal with is going to increase from everyone else doing AI stuff too.

nothing stops you from simulating load. something that scales, by definition, it will have something in the small that is more or less identical to something in the large. it goes both ways.

the obstacle was always the parade of tedious obstacles to create (in this case) a sophisticated virtual harness to simulate (in this case) whatever the hell this article is about. so yeah, actually, the capability of retail coding plans are kind of the only thing that matters...

To even simulate the kind of load Cloudflare gets, you already need to be Cloudflare.

For content delivery you can simulate the load one PoP would get. You don't need to be at Cloudflare scale to build a testbench with 800G+ of traffic at different pps.

If it's so easy, why hasn't the next Cloudflare-destroyer shown up yet? Anyone?

There's more to building a successful CDN business than running workloads in a testing environment.

It's a capital heavy investment in an already crowded marketplace (there are many CDN companies well predating Cloudflare) with little guarantee of return on investment. Who are you expecting to show up? If you want alternatives, there are plenty, for specific products/features.

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