Single point of failure, for both technical and political failures.
What an offensive slap in the face.
Tone deaf to the nth degree.
I don't have a strong opinion here, but giving away compute as a prize for hackathons isn't anything new.
I’m tempted to ask an agent to submit an entry for me.
Cloudflare is perhaps most famously and most significantly an international, global platform. That's kind of the whole point.
Only in the smallprint does it mention you must be a United States or Canada resident to enter.
Advice for everyone considering this: if you're passionate about ideas in this space and have access to an LLM — build it yourself and start your own company. In fact, message me easting.exe [at] gmail. I'll throw in $25k to get us started. I'm a prior founder with an exit. Because this offer from Cloudflare is ridiculous.
Whoever in Cloudflare thought that this is an appropriate compensation for the work is delusional. This is insulting.
So, would it maybe make sense to question this whole bit, before we starting creating platforms for something like that?
Why do you need hundreds of thousands of agents working on the same codebase? In my experience, and what I see around me, quality code that actually works in production isn't produced by "software factory autonomously run by 1337 agents", but instead one human sitting and interacting with maybe 1-3 agents max, back and forth, pair programming rather than letting hundreds of them output million of tokens over hours.
Are others seeing the same thing, or am I in my own little bubble here? All the "software factory with agents" approaches I've spent time looking into, literally produces trash on top of trash, while I see senior developers 10x their productivity while producing better code than before and they have one terminal open with three panes, a text editor, a agent TUI and a general shell, that's it. Is what I'm seeing (and doing myself) not the typical situation out there in the wider world?
But I don't think it's actually a good idea. Keeping everything on the same version is difficult. We have package managers that do a better job.
Orchestrating an agent free for all tends to invite more chaos management.
At the same time there’s folks who quietly have this working.
25k seems like a small bounty for such a large prize.
https://www.cloudflare.com/git-competition/?cf_page=next-git...
None of this is very clever or very compelling.
the computer under your desk!
Roll your Own, don't depend on billionaire platforms to get your work done...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave
https://youtu.be/v_UyVmITiYQ?t=3850
https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/lisa09/tech/slides/berli...
We're now in a world where we expect real-time interfaces to be developed and immediately deployed for our feedback by agents, in business-critical settings where classic SDLC timelines are far too slow, but code quality is becoming more difficult to manage at scale.
Git, at its core, is a fundamental notion that behavior is an auditable tree of immutable changes, where any participant can rearrange or rewind or remix this sequence on a local machine to show, and interact with, a provisional combination of those changes.
Google Wave, with its operational transformation (OT) and federation systems, was similar in many regards. We have CRDTs now, and far better techniques for auto-merging workstreams - including agentic systems that can resolve conflicts intelligently!
Wave fundamentally had a concept that people would come together and evolve a simple chat interface, into a customized real-time application for their use cases, and that that iteration could happen in real-time, with data and behavior both evolving in collaboration with bots. Wherever Git and the broader notion of SDLC goes, I hope it brings the best of this thinking.
Throughout it's existence Google has been revered as a company for its engineering output, but if you interrogate that even a little bit, you end up with a very small minority of gems among a massive ocean of over engineered crap. Even the huge objective open successes like k8s are to this day sold with the massive caveat of "it's heavy & over engineered, but": nobody's calling k8s elegant. Pretty much all of their good products are acquisitions, many of which they've subsequently degraded.
One can certainly make this argument about almost any large corporation, but I do think there's very few with such a stark divide between how the quality of their engineering work is revered & the reality.