The Pulse #136: Cloudflare builds OAuth framework mostly with Claude
Also: new trend of higher base salaries for AI engineers than software engineers, Morgan Stanley shows AI is helpful for rewriting legacy codebases, and more.
The Pulse is a series covering insights, patterns, and trends within Big Tech and startups. Notice an interesting event or trend? Send me a message.
Today, we cover:
AI-assisted coding in practice: Cloudflare and OAuth. A software engineer at Cloudflare built a production-grade OAuth library in five days, making very heavy use of Claude. The full commit history, alongside prompts with Claude are published. This approach sped up development by 2-5x, but feels like an outlier for AI-assisted coding.
Industry pulse. Meta trialing onsite interviews, security risks of AI agents accessing the web, Apple Tax is history for US web payments, Reddit sues Anthropic, which cuts model access for Windsurf, AI startup Builder.ai faked its revenue, and more.
New trend: higher base salaries for AI engineers. Top US AI startups are offering $300-500K base salaries for AI engineers, and €235-355K in the EU. This is pulling up the AI/ML engineering market with salaries that exceed what Senior Director of Engineering roles used to command.
Morgan Stanley and COBOL: can AI speed up the rewriting of legacy code? The answer seems “yes”, based on Morgan Stanley building its own tool on top of ChatGPT. LLMs interpreting and attempting to explain legacy codebases could be a practical use case for these tools.
1. AI-assisted coding in practice: Cloudflare and OAuth
Cloudflare has done something interesting: generating a TypeScript library by AI that implements the provider side of the OAuth 2.1 authentication protocol, for use by Cloudflare staff. OAuth allows third-party applications to obtain limited access to user accounts. OAuth is commonly used for the “Login with Google/GitHub” functionality.”
Kenton Varda, tech lead at Cloudflare used Claude to generate much of the code, and published the full prompt history, as well as the code itself for all to view.