[ascorbic]

People use agents to deploy sites all the time. Buying a domain is part of that if you want to build a site that's beyond a toy. Allowing agents to do a task isn't just for things you do every day – it's also for things you do rarely and need agents' help. It's not just devs using agents to perform these sort of tasks anymore.

Stripe Atlas makes it massively easier for startups to incorporate in Delaware. This is particularly hard for non-US founders. It solves a real problem. I don't think this part will be done by agents though!

Disclaimer: I work at Cloudflare but not on this

[makeitdouble]

Wouldn't it be critical if the agent botched the domain purchase in weird ways ?

Short of throwaway sites (spam etc) it's hard to imagine skimping time on this specific, mostly painless part.

[barnabee]

People are skimping time in every part.

I am watching people who can't code build and deploy dashboards and sites with Claude Code (desktop app - they don't use the CLI), then go cap in hand to developer friends to get it hosted on a domain (rather than some Vercel or whatever URL).

Those people absolutely want to risk letting an agent buy and set up the domain.

This is not necessarily as blindly stupid as you might think. Many of these people know that this workflow is no good for writing code that does anything serious (i.e. storing data for people, taking payments, etc.) but there are a huge number of projects that are just websites, dashboard, data visualisations, etc. with static content and public APIs (Twitter is awash with them) and domains are cheap.

A decent minority of these are even quite cool or interesting.

So a lot of people want to put their vibe-coded weekend project behind a nice domain. Why not?

[makeitdouble]

> why not?

Let's say they buy a first time discounted $5 domain with a $9000 renewal (could the first renewals be made contractually mandatory?), potentially some other weird terms that the agent agreed to for them.

If I was ill spirited I'd go look at how the agents try to buy and setup juicy traps to milk it as much as I can for the first wave.

[rsanek]

I would expect the value of a domain purchase + setup handled by an agent is the highest for people that are not very technical. I'd say that a well-engineered agent will do a better job avoiding botching it than your average non-dev.

[ascorbic]

If the rest of your deployment flow is via the agent, needing to switch over to a different context and open up a browser and login (or create an account) and buy the domain absolutely is a bump in the road.

[lejalv]

Lets remind the purpose of incorporating in Delaware is legal tax evasion, so that we don't not have pensions, health insurance or anything nice, really.

Rename to Greedware.

[lxgr]

Are you sure you know what you're talking about here?

In the US, regulations on pensions, health insurance etc. are governed by the state that employees physically work in, not by the laws of the state of incorporation.

[sam345]

Please explain. Your comment reveals your lack of understanding of corporate law and the benefits of one state versus the other. And smart companies are going to incorporate in Texas anyway and it has nothing to do with taxes. More to do with corporate governance.

[ascorbic]

Investors usually expect that non-US founders incorporate in the US, and usually expect Delaware. There are other states that are more friendly to tax avoidance. Delaware is mostly preferred because it's a known quantity with mature regulation. Investors don't want to deal with dozens of different legal regimes, they want the one that they know about.

[jrflowers]

do you work on a cloudflare delaware-awareness project? Delawareness?

[ascorbic]

Nope, nothing like it. I'm an Astro maintainer and I work on web frameworks.

[nerdsniper]

The primary purpose of incorporating in Delaware is less about taxes and more that Delaware is the "Silicon Valley" of corporate law - incredible concentration of professionals, infrastructure, and intangibles. Any dispute you have will generally be handled better, faster, and cheaper by Delaware courts than they would be anywhere else. I'll quote my good friend who is a startup M&A lawyer: "I'd go so far as to say that it would be managerial malpractice to incorporate anywhere other than Delaware."

[dzink]

Nevada makes it much harder to sue corporate officers when they do malfeasance. Wyoming has tons of privacy perks for the officers (similar to cayman island accounts). “Perks” though also convert into signaling for the intent of the founders.

[pembrook]

No, it’s not. Companies have to pay taxes where they operate regardless of what state they incorporated in.

Stop spreading populist internet bullshit.

Incorporating in Delaware is like 95% about being in a predictable legal framework for any business related dispute imaginable.

[Yizahi]

Uhuh. And in other places, companies are incorporating in Ireland or Luxembourg or other similar tax evasion heavens because of the "predictable legal framework" too. Lol.

[sudofox]

Right, and in other countries they have different laws. In the USA they also pay taxes where they operate. That's how it works.

[sshine]

> it's also for things you do rarely and need agents' help

I recently set up DNSSEC for the first time.

It really was just a bunch of copy-paste from one provider to another.

I like to understand what I'm doing, and LLMs helped greatly with that.

But it was copy-pasting screenshots into chat, so not really agentic.

[ElFitz]

Last time (after years of doing it manually every once in a while) I just gave codex an ephemeral restricted Cloudflare API Token / key / whatever, the screenshot, and it set up all the records on its own.