Anthropic bought Stainless and shuttered its SDK generator. Cloudflare open-sourced Forge instead.
The New Stack Paul Sawers
Cloudflare open-sourced Forge, a tool that turns API definitions into SDKs, docs, and CLIs. It’s a direct answer to hosted generators disappearing on customers midstream.
Based on reporting by The New Stack, Paul Sawers — read the original for the full story.
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Cloudflare has put Forge out as open source software under an Apache 2.0 license, turning an internal code-generation system into something anyone can run, modify, and keep using on their own hardware. The tool takes an API definition and spits out SDKs, command-line tools, documentation, and other interfaces. It is still early, but it already powers the output for Cloudflare’s cf CLI, with the company’s docs and SDKs set to move over in the coming months.
This is not Cloudflare wandering into the idea in the abstract. The company says it now has more than 3,500 API operations spread across hundreds of services, and that sheer size made hosted generators a bad fit. Engineers wanted to see what an API change would do to the SDK, CLI, and docs before the code landed, not after a release had already gone sideways somewhere else.
Forge grew out of work Cloudflare had already started in April, when it previewed cf as a unified command-line interface for Cloudflare’s products. That preview used a new TypeScript-based schema and generation system to keep commands, configuration, bindings, and other interfaces in sync with the API. Forge is the piece that emerged from that effort and now generates the output needed by cf.
The timing is hard to miss. Cloudflare’s move comes 11 days after Google said it had partnered with Speakeasy to open-source its OpenAPI code-generation suite, after losing access to a proprietary SDK-generation service that had been acquired and then shut down. The provider was Stainless, which Anthropic bought on May 18 and then wound down, including the SDK generator that kept client libraries current as APIs changed.
Cloudflare says it tried several hosted products, some in production, and none solved the problem cleanly. The company also wants Forge to reach beyond ordinary SDKs into MCP servers and Cap’n Web bindings, which let applications invoke remote services through Cloudflare’s TypeScript-based RPC system. For now, though, Forge still has a lot to prove: cf is its first production output, and several input formats and generated targets are still future work.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the part of the AI tooling boom that matters more than the demos: boring infrastructure that doesn’t vanish when a buyer gets ideas. Closed generators are fine until the day they’re not, and then everyone gets a surprise migration with a side of apology. Open source is not a vibe here; it’s just less embarrassing.
Read more about this at: The New Stack
