Vercel accuses Cloudflare of stealing

TL;DR

Cloudflare's Sunil forked Vercel's Just Bash package on the official Cloudflare GitHub, stripping beta warnings and security layers, triggering drama that turned out to be a good-faith misunderstanding.

Key Points

• 1.Just Bash is a TypeScript-based virtual Bash emulator built by Vercel's Malta for AI agents. It lets agents explore codebases inside a JavaScript VM instead of a costly real Linux VM, avoiding dangerous native shell access.
• 2.Cloudflare's Sunil Pi (aka 3.1), an original React team member now at Cloudflare, publicly praised Just Bash then quietly forked it into the official Cloudflare agents monorepo as '@cloudflare/shell'. He did this while vacationing in Spain, largely vibe-coding the port via an AI agent.
• 3.The fork stripped multiple security layers: it removed the beta disclaimer, deleted defense-in-depth code that blocks eval and the Function constructor, and replaced Just Bash's hardened Pyodide integration with an insecure one that gives Python full access to the JS host environment.
• 4.Vercel and Cloudflare have fundamentally different runtime architectures that explain why Just Bash matters differently to each. Vercel runs real Docker images per deployment on Linux with Node.js; Cloudflare uses V8 isolates inside a shared 'workerd' runtime that can't spawn processes or access a real shell at all.
• 5.For Vercel, Just Bash was a security tool to prevent AI agents from escaping Node.js down to the native shell; for Cloudflare, it was an enabling tool — the only way to give agents any Bash-like capability since workerd has no native shell access whatsoever.
• 6.Vercel's CTO Guillermo Rauch (Gummo) publicly accused Cloudflare of systematically forking the dev ecosystem to push proprietary runtimes, referencing the earlier Vext/Next.js fork that shipped with 10 vulnerabilities affecting a .gov website, then deleted the post mid-filming.
• 7.Sunil apologized directly, admitting he should have used his personal GitHub, added an experimental label, or not set up the npm publish pipeline so early. Malta subsequently deleted his accusatory article and publicly apologized to Sunil, calling him 'always team web rather than team company.'
• 8.The host frames the root cause as eroded good faith between Vercel and Cloudflare, arguing Malta should have DMed Sunil first given the commit history showed a known friendly engineer, and that Vercel made the biggest misstep by going public before reaching out privately.