The AI Record
engineers don't trust AI opinions. They just trust clear findings tied to standards that we … agreed upon. … it stopped sounding more like, maybe this is a problem and started sounding more like this violates a standard that we actually care about.

Rajesh BhatiaSenior Director of Engineering, Cloudflare · Leader, Cloudflare

Context. Describing early misses with Cloudflare's internal AI code reviewer, before the team tied its findings to machine-readable engineering standards.

Talk: From Assisted to Delegated: Cloudflare's AI Engineering Stack (interview, Background Agents Summit 2026), Ona (YouTube), May 6, 2026, at 26:40.

Not yet checked [ Grade B ] Said in the last year Cloudflare: $2.2 billion revenue, FY2025 Sells AI tools

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Who is speaking

Rajesh Bhatia, Senior Director of Engineering, Cloudflare. Leads the team that built and runs Cloudflare's internal AI engineering stack, so he is in a position to know its adoption and design; Cloudflare also sells the platform products it uses internally.

Cloudflare sells AI or agent tooling, so it has a reason to publish flattering numbers about AI. The passage stays in the archive; read it with that in mind.

How this was checked

Not yet checked by an independent second reader. The wording, speaker and date come from the source linked above; treat it as a lead until it is confirmed.

First reader (reader-web lane, 2026-11-01): two passes over the original audio, a whisper transcription of the full recording and a separate pass over the YouTube caption track, agree on the words quoted, except as noted. Not yet checked by a blind second reader. Cuts: 'have'/'ve' before 'agreed' (passes differ: 'we've' vs 'we have') and the sentences between. Both passes agree on the rest; caption pass filler 'uh' omitted. Punctuation only otherwise.

How to cite this passage

Rajesh Bhatia (Cloudflare), “From Assisted to Delegated: Cloudflare's AI Engineering Stack (interview, Background Agents Summit 2026)”, Ona (YouTube), 2026-05-06, at 26:40. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbLdrAZFQRs Archived at https://the-ai-record.com/passages/cloudflare-engineers-dont-trust-ai-opinions-clear-findings-2026

More from the same source

we've been trying to build … platform layer around AI tooling at Cloudflare, not just coding … but the stack that makes the tools useful and safe inside a real engineering organization.

Rajesh BhatiaSenior Director of Engineering, Cloudflare · Leader, Cloudflare

Context. Describing what his team built, in answer to a request to summarize the internal work.

Talk: From Assisted to Delegated: Cloudflare's AI Engineering Stack (interview, Background Agents Summit 2026), Ona (YouTube), May 6, 2026, at 2:10.

Not yet checked [ Grade B ] Said in the last year Cloudflare: $2.2 billion revenue, FY2025 Sells AI tools Passage page

the code tells the model what's in front of it, but it does not tell the model who owns the service, what the dependencies are, … what databases are being talked to, what conventions are that the teams considers non-negotiable … they reduce the amount of guessing the models have to do. And one thing we learned the hard way is that even with the decent context file, it is better than having none. And when the model stops guessing, the quality goes up everywhere else.

Rajesh BhatiaSenior Director of Engineering, Cloudflare · Leader, Cloudflare

Context. Explaining why Cloudflare invested in Backstage, its internal developer portal, and AGENTS.md files as context for coding agents.

Talk: From Assisted to Delegated: Cloudflare's AI Engineering Stack (interview, Background Agents Summit 2026), Ona (YouTube), May 6, 2026, at 16:24.

Not yet checked [ Grade B ] Said in the last year Cloudflare: $2.2 billion revenue, FY2025 Sells AI tools Passage page

sometime in November, we started looking and seeing a lot more benefit for some of the models that we were trying to leverage. I think Opus 4.5 maybe was the inflection point where that then generally made it so that it was very easy to see the kind of results we were seeing and expecting.

Rajesh BhatiaSenior Director of Engineering, Cloudflare · Leader, Cloudflare

Context. Asked which month or model made AI coding tools start to work at Cloudflare; he had said the company began piloting coding assistants in mid-2025.

Talk: From Assisted to Delegated: Cloudflare's AI Engineering Stack (interview, Background Agents Summit 2026), Ona (YouTube), May 6, 2026, at 7:54.

Not yet checked [ Grade B ] Said in the last year Cloudflare: $2.2 billion revenue, FY2025 Sells AI tools Passage page

the good part was that we were ready with all the background work that we were doing with respect to the building of the context and building of the right sort of MCP infrastructure internally. So when that became a reality, we started seeing a lot more adoption and because it started helping in the real work that people were doing.

Rajesh BhatiaSenior Director of Engineering, Cloudflare · Leader, Cloudflare

Context. Answering how Cloudflare reached 93% of R&D using AI tools; he has just said adoption was slow at first because the models were not good enough.

Talk: From Assisted to Delegated: Cloudflare's AI Engineering Stack (interview, Background Agents Summit 2026), Ona (YouTube), May 6, 2026, at 6:16.

Not yet checked [ Grade B ] Said in the last year Cloudflare: $2.2 billion revenue, FY2025 Sells AI tools Passage page

requests and tokens tell us like usage, like merge requests and pipelines tell us about platform activity, but they do not tell us what value … providing. … the more meaningful long-term question really is like what is the future velocity and outcomes that we can measure with less friction, getting changes out safely.

Rajesh BhatiaSenior Director of Engineering, Cloudflare · Leader, Cloudflare

Context. Asked how Cloudflare thinks about measuring return on AI spend.

Talk: From Assisted to Delegated: Cloudflare's AI Engineering Stack (interview, Background Agents Summit 2026), Ona (YouTube), May 6, 2026, at 20:49.

Not yet checked [ Grade B ] Said in the last year Cloudflare: $2.2 billion revenue, FY2025 Sells AI tools Passage page

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