This episode explores Cloudflare's new AI Agents platform, revealing how durable objects provide a uniquely powerful infrastructure for running agents at scale, and what this means for the future of AI-driven applications.
Cloudflare's AI Agents: Leveraging Durable Objects
- Rita, leading developer products, and Nevil, with a background in startups and deep Cloudflare experience, discuss the launch of Cloudflare's AI Agents. Nevil highlights his early engagement with Cloudflare, sparked by his interest in durable objects, which eventually led him to join the company.
- The core concept revolves around using Cloudflare's Durable Objects, the world's first infrastructure implementation of the actor model, as the foundation for running AI agents. Durable Objects, introduced four years ago, are described as small, rapidly deployable instances of compute that scale horizontally, making them ideal containers for agents.
- Nevil emphasizes that this approach allows developers to bring their own code (from frameworks like LangChain or aisk) and run millions of coordinated agents, accessible via HTTP, websockets, email, and soon, audio/video.
- Rita adds that agents are essentially LLMs combined with workflows, coordination, and external services. Durable Objects provide the tight coupling of compute and state needed for agents to execute plans and communicate effectively, even in case of failures.
- “The moment we figured it out last year was like a lightening bolt for us...we have magically created the perfect infrastructure for running these things.” - Rita, on the realization of Durable Objects' potential for agents.
Origin Story and Development Approach
- The initiative to create a dedicated Agents SDK stemmed from recognizing that people were already building agent platforms on Cloudflare. Nevil, a long-time advocate for Durable Objects, had envisioned agent applications years ago.
- The team considered various approaches, including a no-code platform or a competing library, but ultimately decided to build in public, starting with a basic version developed by Nevil. This approach aligns with Cloudflare's culture of early shipping and gathering feedback.
- Rita explains that they aimed to avoid cluttering the ecosystem with another heavy-handed framework, focusing instead on leveraging the existing "right underlying primitives" of Durable Objects.
Code Demonstration and Agent Functionality
- Nevil provides a code walkthrough, showcasing the Cloudflare Agents starter kit, which includes a React-based frontend and a sample chat agent. The starter kit simplifies setup with a single command-line execution.
- The demonstration highlights key features:
- Tool Calls: Agents can interact with external tools (e.g., fetching the date).
- Human-in-the-Loop: Agents can request human confirmation for actions (e.g., weather queries), with persistent state even if the user closes the browser.
- Scheduling: Agents can schedule tasks using natural language or cron patterns (e.g., "remind me to call my mom every Friday evening").
- Multimodal Potential: Future plans include email support, allowing agents to interact with users even when they're offline.
- The demo emphasizes the advantage of Durable Objects: agents run in the background, independent of any open requests, ensuring persistence and responsiveness.
Agent Abstractions and the "Hello World" Challenge
- Rita and the hosts discuss the lack of a universally accepted "hello world" example for agents, unlike RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) for LLMs. This reflects the current "uncanny valley" of agent development, where trust and control are key challenges.
- The conversation touches on the need for escalating authority and deferring to authority in agent systems, as well as the ongoing exploration of ideal abstractions for agent development.
- Nevil mentions his efforts to demystify the actor model and its application to AI agents through his blog, focusing on the "boring parts" often overlooked in high-level discussions.
Local-First Development and Cloudflare's Perspective
- The discussion shifts to the "local-first" development movement, which prioritizes writing to a local database copy before syncing to the cloud.
- Nevil argues that Cloudflare's infrastructure, particularly Durable Objects, somewhat mitigates the need for a strictly local-first approach. Durable Objects can act as local-first clients, syncing data from multiple sources and providing near-instant updates, even when the user is offline.
- Rita adds that Cloudflare's model offers a "best of both worlds" approach, bringing data and compute close to the user, simplifying the development of local-first applications.
Future Focus: Observability and "Normie" Adoption
- Rita highlights observability as a critical next challenge for agent platforms. Tracking the state and performance of thousands or millions of agents is a complex problem that Cloudflare is actively addressing.
- Nevil emphasizes the goal of making agent technology accessible to "normies," particularly in industries like hospitality and government services. This involves simplifying the development process and focusing on practical business automation use cases.
- The conversation touches on the potential of MCP (presumably "Model-Chain-Prompt," though not explicitly defined) to make agents more accessible, despite the technical-sounding name.
Customer Feedback and Agent Maturity
- The hosts express interest in hearing how Cloudflare customers are using the new Agents platform.
- The discussion acknowledges that agent technology is still in its early stages, with a spectrum of agent capabilities rather than a binary definition.
- The hosts and guests agree that making agent development easier is crucial, and Cloudflare's infrastructure provides a strong foundation for this.
Event Bus, Orchestration, and Multi-Agent Systems
- Nevil mentions the concept of an "event bus" as a central element for building reactive agent systems, going beyond simple cron-based scheduling.
- The conversation touches on orchestration (fan-in/fan-out patterns) and the desire to implement the six patterns of multi-agent systems recently outlined in a LangChain paper.
- The potential for agent-to-agent communication is also discussed, aligning with ongoing research in multi-agent systems.
Cloudflare's Developer Week and Future Announcements
- Rita announces Cloudflare's upcoming Developer Week (in five weeks), a major event for product announcements.
- Recent announcements are highlighted, including:
- Agents framework
- Guardrails for AI Gateway (similar to LGuard)
- A direct REST API for browser rendering (previously available only through Workers)
- The browser rendering API is particularly relevant to agent development, allowing agents to interact with websites in a way that mimics human users.
Bot Detection, Agent Authentication, and the Future of Containers
- The discussion turns to the challenge of bot detection and agent authentication. Cloudflare is actively researching how to authorize agents to act on behalf of humans while maintaining security and preventing abuse.
- The hosts and guests debate whether this problem is fundamentally solvable, given the ability to spoof user agents and IP addresses.
- The concept of "agent shadow" API keys is introduced, suggesting a way to manage agent access with specific restrictions and rate limits.
- The conversation concludes with a teaser about Durable Objects enabling containers, hinting at a future where long-running and CPU-intensive workloads can be handled more effectively within the Cloudflare ecosystem.
Cloudflare's AI Agents platform, built on Durable Objects, offers a compelling vision for the future of agent development. The ability to run agents at scale, close to the user, with built-in persistence and scheduling, opens up new possibilities for Crypto AI investors and researchers. The key takeaway is to closely monitor Cloudflare's evolving agent ecosystem, particularly the developments in observability, multi-agent systems, and the integration of containers, as these will shape the next wave of AI-powered applications.
