Cloudflare revamps CLI as agents take over the internet
What, you think basic usability is improved just for your benefit, human?
Cloudflare is rebuilding Wrangler’s command-line tooling by adding commands for products and interfaces that still lack CLI support. And yes, AI agents are a big reason why.
A single CLI tool for Cloudflare's entire API surface and considerable software stack would be nice for human developers, undoubtedly. It doesn't appear that meatbags stuck typing on keyboards even entered into the equation, however, as Cloudflare said Monday that AI agents are fast becoming its major API users.
"Increasingly, agents are the primary customer of our APIs," the company said. "We want to make every Cloudflare product available in all of the ways agents need."
Sorry, human developers, but it looks like the CLI is now AI agents' turf, and you just live in it.
"The next version of Wrangler is being rebuilt to give agents a consistent, programmable interface to configure and interact with Cloudflare's products," Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht explained in an email to The Register. "This is about making it easier for agents to both build and operate applications on Cloudflare, from development environments to infrastructure configuration."
The company explained that, while Cloudflare's entire API is now available in a single Code Mode MCP server, "there's a lot more area to cover" in exposing Cloudflare's products to the command line. Among the areas Cloudflare wants to cover are Workers bindings, SDKs, configuration files, the Terraform provider, developer docs, OpenAPI schemas, agent skills, and more.
"Many Cloudflare products have no CLI commands in Wrangler," the company said. "And agents love CLIs … so we've been rebuilding Wrangler CLI to make it the CLI for all of Cloudflare."
As part of the process of Cloudflare rebuilding Wrangler for the agentic age, the company is releasing a technical preview that's available now. Interested parties can try it out by running npx cf or installing it globally via npm install -g cf.
Cloudflare said that a principal part of its redesign of Wrangler included the company rethinking its entire code generation pipeline, which led to the creation of a new TypeScript schema it says "can define the full scope of APIs, CLI commands and arguments, and context needed to generate any interface," making it easy to incorporate future Cloudflare products into the CLI to accommodate the needs of AI agents.
Also for the sake of robots and not humans, Cloudflare said that it's going to begin enforcing default CLI commands at the schema layer to ensure that AI agents using Wrangler don't fail due to a less standard command that the agent doesn't know.
"It's always get, never info. Always --force, never --skip-confirmations," the company said. "Agents expect CLIs to be consistent."
Throwing human developers a bone with Local Explorer
All of those new features are great for human developers too, but Cloudflare at least directed one new CLI feature toward its human users.
Local Explorer, available now in open beta for both Wrangler and the Cloudflare Vite plugin, lets users inspect Cloudflare Workers to see what bindings they have attached as well as what data is being stored against them. The idea here is to remove a blind spot in the Worker interface that made it difficult to figure out if the data they were accessing was local or not.
"Until now, working out what data was stored locally required you to reverse engineer, introspect the contents of the .wrangler/state directory, or install third-party tools," Cloudflare said. The API for Local Explorer is available at /cdn-cgi/explorer/api in any application compatible with Wrangler or the Vite plugin.
Cloudflare is fielding feedback for both Local Explorer and the new version of the Wrangler CLI, even from humans, and encourages feedback via its developer Discord channel for those who give it a shot.
As for when Cloudflare CLI users, human or otherwise, can expect more functionality to come to Wrangler beyond the limited features added to the preview so far, the company wouldn't get specific.
"We’re already testing a version that supports the full API surface," Knecht told us. "The current preview is an early step, and over the coming months we’ll expand coverage and bring it together with existing Wrangler functionality." ®