Why Security Could Become Engineering’s Biggest Job

Dane Knecht, CTO of Cloudflare · No Priors

Dane Knecht is chief technology officer of Cloudflare, which protects and speeds up a large share of the world's websites and offers a developer platform with more than 100 tools. He has been at Cloudflare for about 15 years. Cloudflare has about 5,000 employees. This conversation was recorded live at Cloudflare Connect.

Summary

Knecht says AI has made serious vulnerabilities, once a yearly event, show up weekly, and he expects most engineering time over the next 18 months to go to security before productivity jumps. He wants software with less attack surface and written rules that agents enforce in code review. He expects agents to pay websites for content through new micropayment rails, and Cloudflare is building those rails. Inside Cloudflare, AI adoption came largely from the bottom up: an internal AI platform, token-spend alerts and 1,000 interns. These signals are from a No Priors interview with Dane Knecht.

1. Weekly Log4j. Incidents on the scale of Log4j or Shellshock used to happen about once a year, and each one put all of Cloudflare on deck to protect paying and free customers. Knecht says reported vulnerabilities have risen sharply over the last three to six months. Problems that serious are now happening weekly, though not all are made public. As a public good, Cloudflare protects free customers along with enterprise ones. ▶ 1:23
   
   Quote: “This past year, it feels like 10 years compacted into one.” (Dane Knecht, ▶ 0:56)