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_pdp_today at 5:20 AM10 repliesview on HN

The reason this blog post does not come with any concrete examples how to use this enablement for useful and constructive things tells you something very important - it is a toy and they do not know who and how they will use it.

It is cool feature but to what end? Buying a domain is not something you have to do daily to require any kind of automation.

I am also not sure who Stripe Atlas for. I am genuinely confused. It is definitely not something a developer will use.

I understand that you can bootstrap a number of systems but that is like half-hour of work and arguably it is probably a good idea to do it manually to make sure you have strong foundations.

I've have personally never seen a good example where a cross vendor account provisioning actually working. For example, Fly.io used to provision Sentry accounts automatically which you could not access in any other way but through Fly.io. I mean the Sentry account was effectively locked to a project that you cannot transfer - hijacking the actual global alias as well. Vercel did something similar with PostgreSQL via Neon and Redis via Upstash resulting in painful migration processes.

I can imagine ending in some kind of deadlock between services due to security hence why the 30 minutes initial setup is kind of time well spent to avoid future issues.

Maybe it's me.


Replies

grey-areatoday at 5:47 AM

Perfect for spammers, scammers and domain squatters, who can now automate their activities even more.

Can’t think of any other uses for this given the current state of LLM ‘agents’, though I can’t wait for the next report of something like ‘openclaw registered 1000 domains for me without asking and now cloudflare won’t refund me’.

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mpegtoday at 7:16 AM

I think this post needs to be put in context, for months now Cloudflare has been releasing products that allow their whole platform to be usable by agents with the main objective of enabling their customers to dynamically write code using Cloudflare, this is just another step.

For example, you can now with Artifacts and Dynamic Workers make a lovable-style SaaS where your customers ask the AI agent to write software for them, the agent can run it in sandboxes with no build step, it can version it with a git-compatible API, and now you can even have it buy a domain for the end customer or set up their own cloudflare account when they want to move to production.

I personally have no use case for creating domains via agents, but some of the other features they're releasing around this area are extremely useful and I've started to ship internal tools for my clients where they are used, like giving them their own mini claude code that only does one thing – one I shipped last week was an agentic interface for Salesforce reports that understands their domain better (and all the undocumented tech debt) than the built-in Salesforce AI does and therefore manages the context better

ascorbictoday at 6:36 AM

People use agents to deploy sites all the time. Buying a domain is part of that if you want to build a site that's beyond a toy. Allowing agents to do a task isn't just for things you do every day – it's also for things you do rarely and need agents' help. It's not just devs using agents to perform these sort of tasks anymore.

Stripe Atlas makes it massively easier for startups to incorporate in Delaware. This is particularly hard for non-US founders. It solves a real problem. I don't think this part will be done by agents though!

Disclaimer: I work at Cloudflare but not on this

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lxgrtoday at 6:53 AM

> Buying a domain is not something you have to do daily to require any kind of automation.

Which is arguably unfortunate, as it nudges people towards using centralized services because they simply don't know that they have the option to register one.

For example, why not self-host a single-page party invitation site designed by an agent rather than using Facebook or Instagram?

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nottorptoday at 6:49 AM

It's a sales tool.

You can tell Claude to add a new condition to an if and instead it will duplicate the whole if body.

They're hoping you'll tell your "agent" to buy a domain and it will buy 30 instead.

compounding_ittoday at 6:04 AM

> to what end?

People making cooking websites, websites for their garden, etc usually have nowhere to go. A web app who is an agent for a customer will then deploy agents in the backend to deploy the website too.

Basically what one would do manually, you tell one agent to make another agent do it.

Meta agents are where are going it seems.

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Eufrattoday at 7:08 AM

> It is cool feature but to what end?

Doesn’t this sum up most of the AI “innovations” we’ve seen shoveled in this bubble?

We constantly see AI thought leaders backpeddling on promises and just spouting general nonsense. Altman originally talked effusively about an era of “abundance”. An abundance of what? It’s a word salad of feel good vibes without any substance.

Sam Altman has gone from claiming AI might cure cancer to shoveling ads and the scope of AI seems to be reduced to mostly be suitable as flawed, imperfect, but mildly useful coding/automation agents that are likely subsidized beyond economic viability, but you can’t point that out because it’s the future!

hulitutoday at 6:29 AM

> it is a toy and they do not know who and how they will use it.

Just like it is usually used: spam and (D)DoS

cromkatoday at 5:28 AM

> Buying a domain is not something you have to do daily to require any kind of automation.

Sorry, but no, you totally miss the fact there are domain farms which buy the dropped domains and then offer them up for sale. Bots now use AI to analyze the domain's value and automate the whole process. To be able to let AI buy it as well likely offers a tremendous amount of time saving.

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terrytystoday at 6:07 AM

lol, there are lots of people who aren't developers.