Today we are releasing Cloudflare OS, a chatbot with connectors, just like every other tech company is doing.
Except actually, it's different. This is a remake of Sandstorm[.]io, my startup from 10 years ago, except this time built on Cloudflare Workers (the platform I've spent the last 9 years building) and deeply leveraging AI. This is more or less the culmination of my secret 10-year master plan.
This is a full-on personal app vibe coding platform, in which the sandbox is so secure that you can pretty much go wild -- the AI cannot introduce a significant security bug. We believe a company's security team can feel comfortable giving non-technical users permission to vibe code and then sleep soundly at night.
How is that possible? It's the Sandstorm security model, revisited. A "Gadget" is the same thing as a Sandstorm "Grain": a fine-grained app instance. For example, if you have a document editor app, each document runs as a separate instance of the app, in a separate sandbox (one "Gadget").
This means two things, both of which I think are Big Deals:
1. The platform can manage all access control, by controlling who can access the Gadget at all. There is no way the Gadget can accidentally leak itself to an attacker -- even an attacker who has access to other Gadgets based on the same app.
2. Since everyone is running their own copy of the code, everyone can freely *modify* their copy of the code.
Think about #2 a bit more.
What if, when you wanted a new feature in the software you are using, you could just prompt your agent to add it?
This doesn't work in the cloud Software-as-a-Service model, because you are not running your own copy of the app.
Sandstorm tried to change that 10 years ago, but the world wasn't ready, because not enough people had the skills or patience to actually modify their software. AI has changed that. Now you just ask the agent -- the same agent that you are using to help you interact with the Gadget can also modify the code of the Gadget.
And it is so fun.
github.com/cloudflare/clo…
Of course, personal apps are more useful if they can connect to external services. Cloudflare OS introduces a "connector" system we call Gatekeepers. This is sort of like MCP (and MCP is supported as a kind of Gatekeeper), but with a lot more: * Instead of exposing tools, aI am so proud to say, we are making this whole thing open source, Apache 2.0 license, no catch. Truth be told, we weren't quite ready to launch this yet. That's why there's no online version you can just go to yet. But rather than pre-announce vaporware, we decided to go aheadHere's the announcement blog post. Warning: it's enterprise-focused. Let's be frank, that is the biggest market opportunity. But I personally very much care about the indie use case as well. I'm running an instance of this in my own basement. Speaking of which, the GadgetAlso our landing page is pretty sweet, but as of this tweet doesn't have OG card info yet so doesn't render a nice image, oops. Workin on that. os.cloudflare.appBTW I think this project is pretty much exactly what @koomen described here: x.com/ycombinator/st… "Share apps like sharing a Google Doc" is exactly how I've described Sandstorm's model for over a decade...Replying to @ycombinatorA Cloud for Small Software @koomen Agents make it easy to build personal tools for yourself or your team. But deploying, securing, and sharing that software is still far more complicated than creating it. A cloud built for small software could remove that complexity and makeI should mention, Cloudflare OS is the combination of several ideas from different parts of the company. I dwell on the Sandstorm lineage here because it's obviously what I'm excited about. However, there's a whole other side that's about making AI work well for your company,BTW, this past fun tweet was on an early prototype of this project. This was sort of an emergent feature I didn't even intend: A Gadget is a combination of some client code and some server code connected over Cap'n Web RPC, so that the client can just call methods on the serverOpus 4.6 is smart enough to play tic tac toe on this whiteboard with me entirely by making API calls to the app's client API, yet dumb enough to lose at tic tac toe.Some sweet demo videos in this thread.Today we're open sourcing Cloudflare OS: - An agent workspace grounded in skills your team curates. - A platform for personal, modifiable apps that people can build and share. - A new security framework for safe access to internal data. You can use it to:A month ago I gate a talk at AI Engineer World's Fair about Gadgets -- the kernel underlying Cloudflare OS. Here it is. youtube.com/watch?v=RmS5s6…Look, I wanted to call it Lairs. Like your personal AI lair. The agents were "minions". You built "gadgets". See "AI" is right there in the name: "l-ai-r" I even registered lairs[.]net. And you're mad about it being called an OS? Be thankful they didn't let me name it.
man, what does OS mean here?
