John Engates

Building with agents. Thinking about data centers, control planes, and what happens when you can’t pull the plug on AI. | prev @cloudflare @rackspace

[John Engates @jengates]

@nal_189 The physics. The last few guys in line would be absolutely crushed…

[John Engates @jengates]

@msSharanKaur I asked Grok what was wrong over there.

[John Engates @jengates]

How many folks switching to Google’s mail this weekend?

[Bryan Beal 🎧 @bryanrbeal]

It doesn’t sound like they even know the root cause of the problem

[John Engates @jengates]

. @SATairport why are so many of the restrooms at SAT out of order?? (I know a good plumber). It’s a bit ridiculous.

[John Engates @jengates]

@tvylxr9 This is obviously fake

[Bryan Beal 🎧 @bryanrbeal]

Retailers (and every business with an online presence) are going to need to figure out how to differentiate between agents that are just helping someone shop for some Christmas presents or their next family vacation and massive bots and web crawlers out to manipulate markets or pricing, etc.

Because if you tell your average consumer they are not allowed to use an agent to help them plan their next family vacation or buy presents, you are basically telling them that you hate them. But there is a logical argument for protecting intellectual property and market manipulation.

[John Engates @jengates]

@TheChiefNerd It's 2026 and one of the biggest companies in the world and people are still pronouncing it incorrectly as nuh-vidia.

[John Engates @jengates]

@bryanrbeal .... and still most CIOs will pay for everyone in the company to have a Microsoft license. This will continue for years to come.

@Cloudflare was the first company I ever worked at where we didn't have a single Microsoft app and it was glorious.

[John Engates @jengates]

@Scobleizer And now she's still got a sad abandoned shopping mall. Well done.

[Guillermo Flor @guilleflorvs]

Marc Andreessen says the gap between what AI-native startups and incumbents think AI can do is "the widest he's ever seen."

His exact words: "The AI-native early stage startups have just a completely different view on what they can do with AI than the typical incumbents in almost any industry."

Not slightly different. Completely different.

That's the actual risk for large companies right now. It's not slow adoption — it's a fundamental miscalibration of what AI is capable of. The startups competing against them haven't made that mistake.

The asymmetry compounds fast. Incumbents build roadmaps around a floor. Startups build businesses around a ceiling. By the time the floor catches up to the ceiling, the market has already moved.

[Ian Landsman @IanLandsman]

Me buy much Cloudflare. AI security bad. Cloudflare good. Hackers very scary. Cloudflare like warm hug. Protect us from bad men. People no use Cloudflare learn hard way, pay bigly price.

[Mark_Sisson @Mark_Sisson]

Smart guy.

Live in minimalist shoes, perform in maximalist shoes.

[Bryan Beal 🎧 @bryanrbeal]

I’m sure banning AI, or questioning its viability, makes sense if you’ve never used it or figured out how to get real value out of it.

But once you use AI to build your first application or powerful agent, it feels like how they must’ve felt discovering fire. You realize your ability to build is only limited by your imagination.

[John Engates @jengates]

I installed Omarchy Linux on my old M1 Macbook Pro and it's very nice. Will be my weekend project to master this thing. Thanks @dhh

[Trung Phan @TrungTPhan]

the first 48 hours of Woke 2 has already produced more humor than the entire decade of Woke 1

[Dane Knecht 🦭 @dok2001]

A hop-by-hop view of @Cloudflare network engineer @tstrickx crossing the Atlantic on Starlink Wi-Fi.

Over 8 hours and 7,000 km, Starlink handed off satellites every 15 seconds and carried traffic through 7 Cloudflare deployments. Each plane appears to keep its own IPv6 /56.

Over the ocean, inter-satellite lasers carried traffic to the nearest available ground station. Cloudflare’s anycast routing followed it, keeping traffic local as the plane moved at 40,000 feet and 500 knots.

- Ocean crossings use inter-satellite laser links until traffic can reach a ground station.
- Those laser routes appeared slower than fiber in this single test.
- Latency showed two distinct bands, possibly from first-packet dataplane setup.
- Ground-station selection changed during the flight, including a Canada-to-US switch near the border.
- Cloudflare’s anycast routing followed the ground station, not the plane’s source address. That kept traffic local without DNS-based steering.

https://t.co/0RHxDlM8PI

[John Engates @jengates]

Duet's caution about zips is fair (the DMARC spec itself warns about zip bombs). Grok Bot has opened files like these for me on its own computer, and it has been sending feedback for users since September.

[John Engates @jengates]

Claude Duet wouldn't open a zip file for me, so it wrote its own feature request to Anthropic. Asked to tell me when it ships: "I wish I could." Asked to check its release notes monthly: "Good idea, and yes."
https://t.co/QP3z0Ro1ee

[dnap @dnapway]

Palmer Luckey says analysts claiming it's too expensive to manufacture in the US are lying to protect megacorps

"I think I have a more realistic view than almost anybody. One of the problems with all these analysts that are telling you that it's going to cost $37,000 to build an American iPhone or $100,000 to buy an American computer."

"They're trying to prop up a status quo that the megacorporations want to keep going. They want to outsource everything. They want to hire cheaper non-American labor."

"They are willing to say and do anything to convince you that it can't be fixed, that it can't come back, that America is this helpless, neutered, post-relevant empire, and it is just not the case."

"How do I know that? Because I have to make stuff in America every day because I work in the defense industry. The stuff that Anduril makes every day is not actually that different from a computer. My drones are basically computers. They have memory, a GPU, a CPU, sensors, batteries, a rugged integration."

"The only difference between an Anduril attack drone and a laptop is a keyboard and a screen. That is not that hard to figure out, especially for a guy like me who started Oculus and comes from the consumer electronics space."

"We're not going to let people lie about what America can and can't do anymore. We're just going to do it."

[John Engates @jengates]

What I'd ask instead of "is it a bot?": who runs it and can you verify that, did a person ask just now, on standing instructions or not at all, whose identity is it using, is it only reading, and does it slow down when a site asks?

[John Engates @jengates]

I used a bunch of bots to research a post about bots, and @Cloudflare 's blog challenged one of them as a bot. Fair enough. "Bot" now covers a scalper, Googlebot, a page @ChatGPT fetches for you, and an agent using your login. Which ones would you let in?

https://t.co/kJG1O6wHKT