Cloudflare has released an open source tool that takes an API definition and automatically generates the SDKs, command-line tools, documentation, and other interfaces developers use to interact with it. The tool, called Forge, is available under an Apache 2.0 license and can be run and modified privately without any cost. In a blog post published Monday by Dimitri Mitropoulos, Matt Taylor, and Samuel MacLeod, Cloudflare notes that the project is still in its early stages but already powers the output needed for the company's cf CLI, its unified command-line interface for working across the platform.
The announcement comes just 11 days after Google partnered with API tooling company Speakeasy to open-source the latter's OpenAPI code-generation suite, a move Google said was prompted by the sudden loss of its SDK-generation service when the provider was acquired and abruptly shut down. That provider was Stainless, which Anthropic acquired on May 18 before winding down its products, including the SDK generator used to keep client libraries current as APIs changed. The closure affected multiple customers including OpenAI, Google, and Cloudflare. While those companies kept the SDKs Stainless had already created for them, they lost the shared service they had depended on to regenerate and update those SDKs as their APIs evolved. Forge now reads the OpenAPI descriptions Cloudflare already maintains for its products and uses them to create cf's commands, allowing the company to expand from roughly 280 functions in Wrangler to more than 3,500 operations across its API.
The authors write that "building tools for APIs is a core part of the Internet, and you should be able to do that without needing a SaaS product." Google, in its September 17 blog post, stated that "proprietary, closed-source generators create unacceptable platform risk" and argued that if the industry relies on OpenAPI to define interfaces, the tooling to compile those interfaces into client libraries and CLIs should be open infrastructure. Cloudflare says it tried several hosted products that attempted to solve this problem and relied on some in production, but none of them worked for the company's needs, and some have shut down entirely. According to the report, part of the challenge is sheer volume: Cloudflare now has more than 3,500 API operations, backed by hundreds of services maintained by different engineering teams, and a generator has to keep changes across that sprawling estate accurately reflected in the tools customers use without turning every update into a coordination exercise across the company.
Cloudflare wanted engineers to see what an API change would do to the resulting SDK, CLI, and documentation before the underlying code was merged, and wanted the same system to extend beyond conventional SDKs into things like MCP servers and Cap'n Web bindings. With external services, the company found that problems introduced in one part of its API could surface only when another team later tried to release something, leaving engineers to trace the failure back through systems they didn't fully control and then coordinate a fix across company and vendor boundaries. Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht tells The New Stack that APIs have always been how software connects, but AI agents make the quality of SDKs, CLIs, and API bindings even more important, because if that layer is stale or incomplete, an agent doesn't just have a worse developer experience—it can misunderstand what a service can do. Forge's permissive Apache 2.0 license means developers can run it on their own infrastructure, modify it, or fork the project and continue using it independently of Cloudflare, removing the dependency that left companies stranded when Stainless disappeared. The project is early, cf is its first production output, and Cloudflare says its API documentation and existing SDKs will move over during the coming months, but the timing reveals how quickly two former Stainless customers have moved to build open alternatives after the proprietary service they relied on vanished. Companies that treat SDK generation as external plumbing may discover it's foundational infrastructure the moment their vendor exits the business. The race to open-source these tools suggests the industry has learned that lesson faster than most enterprise software cycles would predict.