Cloudflare's cf CLI hands agents the whole API

Cloudflare has released cf, a command line tool that reaches the whole Cloudflare API rather than the slice of it its older Wrangler CLI covered. The company says cf exposes more than 3,000 operations against roughly 280 in Wrangler, and it has designed the new tool around the assumption that an AI agent, not a person, will be the one typing the commands.

The numbers behind that assumption are Cloudflare's own. Agents accounted for a quarter of Wrangler use in March and reached 48 per cent last week. They also behave differently from people: Cloudflare says agents run almost twice as many distinct commands a day and are almost four times as likely to run six or more in a session.

Built from the API schema, not by hand

cf is generated rather than written. Cloudflare's new Forge pipeline reads the OpenAPI schema behind its API documentation and SDKs, adds a little annotation, and emits CLI commands from it, which is how the command surface grew from a few hundred hand-built paths to the full API. Wrangler's commands were contributed product team by product team, and Cloudflare is frank that this produced inconsistent vocabulary across d1 info, hyperdrive get and workflows describe.

The defaults aim squarely at machine readers. JSON is the output format for most commands, pretty printed when a human is watching and condensed when an agent is, because an agent handed a human-readable table ends up piping it through a filter it never needed. A new subcommand, cf cli search, lets an agent describe what it wants to do in natural language and get back candidate commands, and cf points agents at it the first time they run --help.

TypeScript config and Vite by default

Configuration moves to cloudflare.config.ts, starting with Workers, which brings type checking and editor support to the settings an agent is editing on your behalf. Vite becomes the default local development server alongside a plugin suite for framework authors. For jobs that need real human input, such as searching for a domain to buy, cf breaks the API's requirements into a series of validated inputs rather than expecting one long chain of named parameters.

cf is in open beta and installs globally with npm i -g cf. Cloudflare recommends keeping Wrangler for projects that already carry a wrangler.jsonc, wrangler.json or wrangler.toml config and moving them over with cf migrate, and it warns that cf's commands do not match Wrangler's, so an agent should check cf --help or run cf cli search rather than guess.

Our opinion

The command count is not the interesting part of this release; the concession underneath it is. A developer tool is now being designed for a primary user who never reads the documentation, and once that is accepted the rest follows: JSON by default, a search index instead of a manual, and configuration in a typed file an agent can validate rather than a directory of settings it has to infer. Cloudflare's case for starting again instead of rewriting Wrangler is more honest than most migration stories, because a model has absorbed years of Wrangler guidance and changing that behaviour means arguing with its training, while a new name arrives without baggage. The people who still type commands are the ones carrying the risk. They are now the minority the tool tolerates, and the first casualty of software written for someone else is always the error message.