Aparna Somaiah

Product @cloudflare | ex-@Airbnb, ex-@VMware | Opinions: All my own.

[sam rhea @LakeAustinBlvd]

what your team wants:

max thinking AI model to vibe code a super app that no one asked for

what your team needs:

high-quality context library and the ability to safely create and run workflows (mostly deterministic, sometimes AI inference steps) on top of your systems of record

[Aparna Somaiah @aparna_sg]

@confusedqubit @CloudflareDev You can do that with Agent Lee in the dashboard. Click "Ask AI" and ask the agent to deploy a worker for you. @BraydenWilmoth

[balint @BalintFerenczy]

I joined Cloudflare as a design engineer!
Made some clouds.

[Adewale Oshineye @ade_oshineye]

Cloudflare's Agents Week shipped so much new infrastructure that I had to make a map. What are people planning to build with it?

[Cloudflare @Cloudflare]

Agent Lee is an in-dashboard agent that shifts Cloudflare’s interface from manual tab-switching to a single prompt. Using sandboxed TypeScript, it helps you troubleshoot and manage your stack as a grounded technical collaborator. https://t.co/bVqer0inVp

[Dane Knecht 🦭 @dok2001]

We named it Agent Lee. If you don't know why that matters, read the Wired piece on @icqheretic first. Then come back and try the agent. The name carries weight and its just getting started.
https://t.co/49PgLqqwMX

https://t.co/6HR3E66ORP

[Ashley Peacock @ashleypeacock]

Cloudflare's dashboard-based AI copilot, Agent Lee, can now undertake write actions and generate graphs dynamically with generative UI

You can now ask Agent Lee "Add a CNAME to my domain" and Agent Lee will do so, with verification steps

Or try "Show me a chart of my traffic over the last 7 days" and watch Agent Lee generate a graph representing this data directly in the chat

Currently available in beta to all users on the free plan in the top right of the dashboard

[Brayden @BraydenWilmoth]

Cloudflare dashboard can now complete tasks for you.

- "Create a Worker and bind a new R2 bucket to it"
- "Change my DNS records to 1.1.1.1"
- "How many errors have happened this week"

Not only do we tell you, but we show you with generative UI.

PROTIP: Use full-screen mode.

[Brayden @BraydenWilmoth]

there is so much you can build on this platform

[Cory Wilkerson @corywilkerson]

🍊 It's been 90 days for me at @Cloudflare ...

👇 Here's what has surprised me
• There's very little ceremony or overhead when it comes to shipping, everyone is here to build
• Cloudflare is extremely high agency — there's alignment but it's just enough and most of it exists to unblock folks
• Management is very technical up and down the hierarchy, every leader / manager here talks in specifics
• Executive tier is extremely engaged, in various channels, very responsive, knows the details
• Startup mentality is pervasive; I thought we'd slow down after the Replicate acquisition but we've sped up

👇 Here's what I love
• Community. Reminds me a lot of my favorite parts of GitHub. Folks here are superfans of one another's work. They want to meet & hang and we're collectively excited when someone new joins the club.
• The primitives that we get to build on are excellent -- all built to be distributed at massive scale by default
• Hardware! We source and build our own hardware!
• We dogfood everything, you build "on platform", you have good stat sig day one!
• Innovation is funded everywhere -- "what if we built this on <some new company building new chip>" is just another day at the shop
• We have some folks around that seem to think different/understand the internet in ways that I don't think is all that common

👇 Here's why I'm long Cloudflare
• Tenure at Cloudflare is remarkably long as is the % of folks who have boomeranged back, both very bullish signals
• It's a sleeper hit in the developer platform space, yes WAF and yes Cloudflare One are big businesses but we are just getting started & we are cooking in developer platform
• Every team I talk to has something in the works that they're extremely excited to ship and then another thing right behind that
• When I ping folks in my network to talk about Cloudflare, they are immediately responsive
• The product has a lot of rough edges -- folks know, they're working on it -- it only gets better from here

But don't just take it from me! I asked three colleagues what their favorite things were, here's what I got.

• "The way Cloudflare empowers engineers at every level of the org to have huge impact"
• "You can basically work on anything at cf, talented engineers, infra moat so its not just software, cool research and innovation that you don't really get anywhere else"
• "Cloudflare has a pretty unique tech stack with a really powerful infrastructure. We're working on some really innovative things that no one else is doing. There is a lot to do -- pretty much anyone can see something needs to be done and go do it."

All of that said -- I might be dm-ing some of you soon to work on some really challenging MLE stuff here at Cloudflare soon. Answer me if this sounds like your kind of thing 😜

[Aparna Somaiah @aparna_sg]

@championswimmer @ranjana_ninan

[Aparna Somaiah @aparna_sg]

Months 1 and 2(.5) - An update on my meanderings and my break https://t.co/6eUpPbJpVS

[Aparna Somaiah @aparna_sg]

I noticed a jar of hair ties on the table at a local ramen place and wondered what to do with them.

Turns out they kept them there for customers to tie their hair back so they could enjoy their meal in peace.

No fuss, just care.
From day one.
Talk about customer experience.

[Aparna Somaiah @aparna_sg]

An Experiment in Life Design: Embarking on a Career Break https://t.co/HjNhsrcxOf

[Aparna Somaiah @aparna_sg]

In startups, AI coding tools aren’t just prototyping helpers—they’re getting products to market. Fast.
Code quality? Secondary.
The thinking: ship something that works now, refactor when traction hits.

More thoughts coming soon.

[Aparna Somaiah @aparna_sg]

From chats with PMs, devs, &amp; founders, 2 threads around AI tools like Cursor, Bolt, etc. are becoming clear.

In big tech, they are great to prototype with but devs want the real coding to be left to them

In startups, they’re shipping real products with them. Quality? Fix later

[Aparna Somaiah @aparna_sg]

5/That said, I will keep tuning the AI-generated code for my side project. It’s incredibly fun—and slightly addictive—to watch a fully functional app come to life so fast. But in my day-to-day, most of my time will remain spent on high-level strategy and execution. So vibe-on 🤘

[Aparna Somaiah @aparna_sg]

1/ I spent ~45 minutes “vibe-coding” with Cursor. The result? A rudimentary working preview of an idea I’m working on. The workflow was straightforward, but there is a lot that needs refinement. Even after this, I firmly believe that AI will augment, not replace, my day job.

[Aparna Somaiah @aparna_sg]

4/Beyond rapid prototyping, there’s a reality check: PMs juggle customer needs, planning, stakeholder management, and more. Building production-ready software isn’t our main focus. Once we’ve conveyed the vision, we typically move on to other critical tasks.