Cloudflare Drops the Hammer on AI Crawlers

In this episode of Front-End Fire, Jack Harrington, Paige Neeringhaus, and TJ Vantole discuss the latest in web development and tech news. They begin by covering Vercel's recent Ship event, highlighting the focus on their hosting platform and new features like the Fluid Compute Engine's pricing model, Vercel Sandbox, rolling releases, bot management, an AI agent, and first-class support for micro front-ends. The panel then discusses Cloudflare's declaration of Content Independence Day, aimed at protecting content creators from AI crawlers, while also expressing skepticism about Cloudflare's proposed marketplace for content valuation. Finally, they explore Neon's new Launchpad, which simplifies database setup for developers. The hosts conclude with a lightning round, covering Figma's IPO filing, an update on the Deno v Oracle trademark saga, and Anthropic's experiment where Claude, their AI model, ran a vending machine. The episode wraps up with each host sharing what's making them happy, including Squid Game, Bobby Banilla Day, and the new Formula One movie.