To explain what I mean, think about the way that software is produced and distributed today. You have a developer in an ivory tower who builds an app and then sends it down to the users who use the app. Many of them are happy with it, but some of them are not. Some of them say, "This app needs some additional features for my use case," and so they go to the developer and they say, "Oh great developer, will you please grant my feature request? Your app is literally unusable without it." And so then the developer's representative, the product manager, takes these feature requests and files them into Jira where they are never seen again.

But sometimes the product manager sees a feature request and says, "Ah, I want that too," and then that feature request goes onto the road map and the developer works on it. The developer is implementing all these features that each one is only used by a small subset of users, and each one is adding all these if statements to their code and making things messy. They don't like it because the codebase is becoming a mess and each of these features is really kind of boring to implement.

And so the developer says, "Ah, I know what I need to do. We need a rewrite. We need a new architecture that has a plug-in system." And then every one of these features can be a plug-in and it can be nice and clean and easy to build, and the core can stay clean. And so the developer goes off and starts working on the new architecture with the plug-in system. And there are still feature requests coming in and the developer says, "Well, we can't do those features yet because we need the plug-in system. This will be so much easier once we have the plug-in system. And if we do it now, we're just delaying that and we'll just have to redo it later anyway." And so the years go by and the new architecture is not ready yet and none of the features are being implemented and people are saying, "What are they doing? This developer has given up their product." and everybody is sad.

So AI seems to present a new alternative to this. What if the developer could create their app, the first version of their app, give it to the users, and the users if they need a new feature could ask their AI agent to write that feature just for them, add it to the app? Then everyone gets the features they need. No one is bogged down in everyone else's features, and the developer gets to keep the core app nice and clean and beautiful.

But there's a problem with this, which is that none of the infrastructure we build software on today is like remotely designed for this. You've got Apple and Google for the past 15 years gatekeeping their systems to the point where there's like five companies that can build mobile apps now because everyone else has been banned. And it's almost like easier in the United States to buy a gun than it is to get access to your own phone to install unsigned software. You go to Google and you say, "I want to install unsigned software." And now they're going to say, "Oh, whoa, hold on, buddy. You seem upset. You should go home and think about this. If you still want that unsigned software in 24 hours, then you can come back and talk to us."

Fortunately, we have a workaround for all of that, which is the web. On the web, everyone can build whatever they want. And it turns out it's fine. It's not the security disaster that Apple and Google keep telling us would happen. So you can build whatever you want on the web, but there's a different problem on the web, which is that for the past 25 years of cloud architecture we've been running in the wrong direction. When you distribute a web app, you run it on your own server, put it on your server, and then users send requests to your server where the one version of your app, the one blessed version runs for every single user. And so that's convenient for developers. That's why we've done it, so the developer can make sure things stay updated and everyone's on the same version. But it obviously means that users cannot customize their apps.

So last year vibe coding comes along and we have all these vibe coding platforms out there, and most of them are targeting web apps because that's the easy thing to target, but they're all targeting this existing infrastructure which is actually like not the right way to do it. We need something entirely different. And hence my point.

I have an app here which is like a collaborative whiteboard app. This is a one-shot prompt. I have an app here to help me filter Spanish email. So I made a little app to help me do that. A gadget. I have a gadget to help me sort pull requests that I need to review on GitHub. And those are things that I just vibe coded from scratch.

But we also have this concept over here of blueprints. And a blueprint is someone made a gadget and they decided that it was useful and they took a blueprint of it, which is just taking the code, exporting the code without the data, which they can then share with someone else, and then other people can instantiate gadgets from these blueprints. So we have like a document editor app here, a Kanban board, and a slide builder.

So this slide builder was built by my colleague Philip here who's a product manager at Cloudflare, and of course these days all product managers are also prolific engineers. So he vibed this in an afternoon I believe, but if I instantiate this gadget I get this nice little slide deck. It has things I can edit and so on. And if I shared it, it would work well.

So an important point here is that when I instantiate this app, it is only for one slide deck. If I want multiple slide decks, I make multiple instances of the gadget, one for each. And the reason for that is that all gadgets are shareable and you can collaborate with other people on them, and the sharing model is implemented by the platform instead of by the app itself. So if I click up here, I get sort of a share dialogue kind of like a Google Docs share dialogue. I can create a share link and send it to people. And because each gadget is just the one thing that you want to share, that means that the platform can implement the sharing model and the access control such that the gadget itself can't possibly get that wrong.

So if I click on here, I can see the conversation. And of course, I didn't edit the slides myself by hand. I asked the agent to make them for me, right? And every app in this platform automatically integrates with agents so that you can do that. And so what I did is I gave Claude a link to this document, this Google doc where I had described all of the gadgets that I wanted or all the slides that I wanted in my presentation. And crucially though, this is the interesting point. I said, "If you need to add any new features to the slides app itself to support some of these slides, feel free to do so." And it did.

Claude read all the code for the app and read my doc and said, "Yes, actually, let's see. Slide three needs a strikethrough formatting. That's not implemented. We can add that. Some of the slides require things to be centered. And you know, I guess Philip's design taste is too good for centering text. But my more pedestrian taste called for some centering. And that's okay. Claude can add that." More interestingly, slides five and six here, I asked for this like really crappy diagram of the cloud, right? And the app didn't support sort of like arbitrary diagrams. It supported, you know, box diagrams and arrows and such, but not an arbitrary drawing like this. And so Claude said, "Okay, that's okay. We can add a feature. We'll add a feature that allows you to insert a bunch of SVG. Just paste it into this box here. And now it becomes part of the slide."

And now that's not very useful for any human, but it was perfectly useful for Claude who then generated the SVG. Now, at this point, you might be looking at this and saying, "That's a little scary. SVG can contain JavaScript. Are there XSS bugs here?" And the answer to that is it doesn't really matter because of the way this environment is set up.

So the UI that you see for the app here is running inside a null origin iframe sandbox with content security policy set so that it basically cannot talk to anything, any of the rest of the world, can't access any cookies, so on. The only thing it can do is post message to the parent frame and through that post message channel we set up a Cap'n Proto RPC session which forwards onto the server and all the way back to the server code for this gadget, which is this code here, which is written as a durable object on Cloudflare workers. And basically that means this server code runs in a dynamic worker sandbox on the server side where it too is prevented from talking to any of the rest of the world. So now we've set up this environment where there's a vibecoded client and a vibecoded server. They can only talk to each other and produce the UI for the user. And so if you have an XSS bug, it actually doesn't end up mattering because these can't leak anything. They're prevented from doing so. And basically there is no security bug you can have in this code that matters. And that makes it safe to go and do things.

And furthermore, all of this is actually running locally on my laptop, which is why it doesn't matter that the internet didn't work because this is all running on workerd, which is our open source runtime. A lot of people don't know this. The Cloudflare workers runtime is open source. You can self-host it. And I'm excited about that because we have in here a Home Assistant connector and a Spotify connector. And I want to run this in my basement and use it to do home automation tasks.

So this is where though I have to give a little bit of an apology. A couple of months ago when I submitted the proposal for this talk, this was like a side project I was working on and the plan was I was going to come here and I was going to present it and then I was just at the end of the talk going to yeet it onto GitHub so that everyone could go and download and play with it themselves. In the last couple of weeks, there's been a lot of excitement inside Cloudflare and this has become a more serious project. And so last Thursday, Sven, our CTO, pulled me into a room and said, "Kenton, I don't think you should yeet this. I don't think this is yeet material. I think we need to be more careful and disciplined and intentional about how we release this. So, let's hold it off for a few weeks." And I was pretty upset about that because I promised in the abstract that I was going to open source it, but sorry. That's not happening today. It will happen soon though. And I wish the silly counter worked because GPT makes some silly counters, but oh well, it's not a big deal. And that's all I got.