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Cf: The Agentic CLI for the Cloudflare API

44 points macleos 3 hours ago 17 comments

verdverm 1 hour ago | parent

Kudos to cloudflare on this, it looks like a great CLI, I especially like the `cf cli search`.

Related, Matt Pocock's skill for having agents generate an interactive bash script for things only humans can do (or should do), presented in the context of devops like activities

https://github.com/mattpocock/skills/blob/main/skills/produc...

I have found that having the agents write scripts to use tools like this is better (less tokens, more reliability, fewer side quests) than giving it to them directly with markdown they may or may not follow on any given day.

The other benefit to this is that you can put scripts on either side of the agent and remove all credentials from their process, removing whole classes of issues you don't want to have to tell your boss about. CLIs like this are great for read-only debug sessions, but if you are going to make modifications to your cloud infra, keep doing IaC.

rahimnathwani 26 minutes ago | parent

You linked to /skills/productivity/to-questionnaire/SKILL.md

Did you mean to link to /skills/engineering/wizard/SKILL.md ?

unified101 1 hour ago | parent

I think the shape of clouds and services is going to change given current clouds are uxed for humans. Cloudflare is making the right bet. Specially the free agent report account. That's like a wonderful idea for building agent share.

smithclay 1 hour ago | parent

This is a lot to like here as someone who pretty much exclusively uses the Cloudflare API via agents. Hoping (since it's built on top of Forge), some kind of native terraform support is also in the works.

Great when you're a solo dev deploying a worker, but would be incredible for production deployments if this could also just natively output terraform code.

alasano 1 hour ago | parent

I don't know what it is about wrangler that made me dislike it so much but I welcome this change since it's meant to replace wrangler.

verdverm 1 hour ago | parent

re: wrangler, my biggest gripe was inconsistency between dev and prod

alasano 57 minutes ago | parent

I think I may be confusing my annoyance with pages vs workers and agents that kept deploying to pages due to outdated training data.

Wrangler still didn't feel great to use.

recroad 1 hour ago | parent

This is cool, but I've never had an issue with agents working on Cloudflare by just making REST calls. With the rest docs, it knows pretty much everything about what kind of operations it can do. Is the CLI a subset of that or does in encompass everything?

verdverm 1 hour ago | parent

The actual title is

> Introducing cf: the agentic CLI for the entire Cloudflare API

emphasis my own to highlight the key word missing in the HN title

slowin 1 hour ago | parent

I don't understand why this is written in Typescript. This is a great example of how agents can write code (I'm sure they wrote `cf`), yet having fundamental computer science knowledge is still critical. Do not force your users to manage the dependencies of your cli. Do write your cli in a compiled language. Understand the reason for those decisions and tell your agents to use the correct architecture.

kelchm 47 minutes ago | parent

Are you really suggesting that the choice to use Typescript wasn't a deliberate one?

IMO -- it makes total sense within the existing Cloudflare tooling ecosystem.

slowin 38 minutes ago | parent

Whether it was deliberate or not, I do not think it's a good choice. When agents can write in any language, there's no reason to pick the wrong tool for the job. At this point Javascript/Typescript belongs only in the browser. It's the suboptimal choice for every other environment. Especially for a command line tool. Even if the back-end is written in Typescript (also not the best choice imho), the clients need not be in the same language.

chatmasta 28 minutes ago | parent

Typescript and the npm/JS ecosystem may be complex, but you don’t need AGI to figure out how to install a CLI built with TS. My agent can figure out how to install this.

slowin 22 minutes ago | parent

It's not just the complexity. You're also vulnerable to supply chain attacks via NPM. It's also performance as you don't need the entire javascript runtime just for a CLI.

tcdent 19 minutes ago | parent

My read is that it's generally the teams that have been assigned to build a certain product that end up choosing the architecture that it runs on. So when we see TypeScript involved in TUI and CLI applications, most of it is just a repurposing of skill sets from that domain into the terminal. In an organization like Cloudflare, I expect that the developers who don't specialize in TypeScript are working on far more important problems.

squiffsquiff 16 minutes ago | parent

AWS and GCP CLIs have been in Python for a decade or more. Last I checked Python was not a compiled language

esafak 53 minutes ago | parent

1.0 isn't actually out and CI is red. https://github.com/cloudflare/cf/commits/main/ https://github.com/cloudflare/cf/releases

I have been using the pre-releases with success, but this post could have waited a few days!