It's kind-of a requirement in 2026 -- you need something to MTM the amount of bot traffic that's going around these days and CF provides a good product and service (even outside of just the challenges portion.)
If you want to be mad at somebody, then it should be at the AI companies for basically forcing the rest of the internet to use them. They have broken every non-enforceable contract that it was built upon. We went nearly 25 years without needing something a MTM solution like that, and I would say, in the last 5 or so, it has become a hard requirement
Over at AppleInsider, the amount of bot traffic is insane, and it's gotten to the point where it's starting to even jack up some of our Google Analytics. No, GA we didn't see a natural 320% rise in visitors from Singapore...
It's almost a full time job to manage. Our WAF rules are 90% 'oh shit AI scraper bots found a new vector.' It doesn't border on DDoS -- it effectively is. Coupled with all the Google changes that started a few years ago -- which is a separate topic I could rank about for ages -- 2026 is just a VERY bad time to be a website owner. I actually wiped most of our robots.txt rules the other day because literally nobody followed them. Anybody who tells you otherwise is flatly lying.
This is the new normal though, we gotta try and figure it out
"Note: Little Snitch version 1.0.0 does not currently work with the Btrfs file system! Btrfs is used by default on Fedora, so Little Snitch does not currently identify processes on Fedora. We are working on an 1.0.1 release to fix the issue as soon as possible!"
I fail to see the obvious wisdom in having AI re-implement chunks of existing frameworks without the real-world battle testing, without the supporting ecosystem, and without the common parlance and patterns -- all of which are huge wins if you ever expand development beyond a single person.
It's worth repeating too, that not everything needs to be a react project. I understand the author enjoys the "vibe", but that doesn't make it a ground truth. AI can be a great accelerator, but we should be very cognizant of what we abdicate to it.
In fact I would argue that the post reads as though the developer is used to mostly working alone, and often choosing the wrong tool for the job. It certainly doesn't support the claim of the title
The whole premise of this is kinda wrong. Google killed SO more than anything else. Much like how they’re killing the rest of the web today. AI certainly didn’t help, but it is/was not the root cause, nor was the ‘toxic’ environment
I have been on a call with a CMP where they got mad at me for not resetting our user's preferences and because our 'do not accept' was high due to the fact i refused to de-promote it via a dark pattern. I kid you not.
fwiw; looking at our stats for the past year:
No consent: 40.8%
Full Consent: 31%
Just closed the damn window: 28.1%
Went through the nightmare selector: 0.07%