Chandlery

What only you can do

The short list of steps your AI assistant cannot do for you — so none of them is a surprise.

Almost everything is your assistant's job: writing the code, creating the database and storage on Cloudflare, deploying, pushing secrets, attaching your domain. You never have to find your way around the Cloudflare dashboard.

This page is the short list of things it genuinely cannot do, and when each one turns up.

You do thisWhenWhat it involves
Create a Cloudflare accountStage 0Free, no card
Sign in to Cloudflare from your terminalStage 4, once per computerA browser tab, one Allow button
Confirm each production deployStage 5, every timeTyping a confirmation when asked
Buy a domainStage 5, only if you want your ownRoughly $10–15 a year
Put a card on CloudflareOnly if you add file uploadsThe first 10 GB are still free
Paste keys from another serviceOnly if you add payments or emailCopying a key from, say, your Stripe dashboard

The one that catches people out

At stage 4 your assistant will stop and ask you to run:

pnpm exec wrangler login

A browser tab opens, Cloudflare asks whether to authorise Wrangler, you click Allow, and that is the whole thing. Once per computer.

This is not an error

If your assistant says it cannot sign in for you, nothing has gone wrong — it is simply your turn. Run the command, then tell it you are signed in and it will carry on from where it stopped.

What it costs

Nothing, to start. Cloudflare's free tier runs a real site with real users and does not ask for a card.

Two things cost money later, and only if you want them:

  • A domain of your own — roughly $10–15 a year. Until then your site lives at a free .workers.dev address that works perfectly well for showing people.
  • File uploads — Cloudflare's file storage needs a card on file, even though the first 10 GB are free. If your product does not let people upload files, you never touch this.

If your assistant just prints an error

A good assistant tells you when it has hit one of these, what you will see, and how to say you are done. If yours only prints an error code and stops, paste the error back and ask:

Is this something I need to do myself? Walk me through it — tell me exactly what to run, what I will see, and how to tell you when it is done.