Reducing Friction With AI by Picking Services That Actually Work With You

So I've been running AI agents for basically everything I do and one thing I've really noticed is that half the friction isn't the AI. It's the services around it. Like Claude is genuinely incredible right but if the tools you're plugging it into fight you at every step then you're just going to be slow regardless.

I've spent ages picking my stack specifically around what works well with agents. Not what's popular or what everyone uses but what actually gets out of the way. And honestly the difference is huge.

Cloudflare handles everything

I run basically everything web through Cloudflare. DNS, Pages, Workers, Turnstile, rate limiting, all of it. And the reason is dead simple. Everything has an API and the API actually works.

So when I was setting up rexford.dev I just gave Claude my API token and told it to sort everything out. It went and deleted the default DNS records, added all the Protonmail email stuff, created a Pages project, built the site, deployed it, wired up the custom domain, created a Turnstile CAPTCHA widget, even set up rate limiting on the contact form. All through the API. I didn't open the dashboard once and the whole thing was live in about 30 minutes.

Now compare that to trying to do the same thing on something like Netlify or traditional hosting where you're clicking through dashboards and copying values between screens and doing half the work manually. That's friction right. Every time an agent has to stop and go "okay you need to go do this bit in the browser" that's a break in the flow. With Cloudflare that basically never happens.

And Pages is really good for this. You build your site, run one wrangler command and it's deployed. Custom domains are just an API call. SSL sorts itself out. There's no build pipeline to mess around with. Agents can handle the entire thing from start to finish.

Protonmail and why nobody is talking about this

So this is the one I'm really surprised nobody mentions. I run Protonmail with Proton Bridge locally and I've got one single MCP server connected to it. And from that one setup I can handle email for every single project I run.

The way it works is I've got multiple custom domains verified in Protonmail right. Each domain has its own addresses. When an agent needs to send an email from a specific project it just passes the from_addr parameter and the MCP server sends it as that domain. One MCP server. One bridge connection. Unlimited domains and addresses.

So think about what that actually means. I've got different Claude Code instances running different projects. One is handling support emails for one brand, another is sending contact form stuff for a different site, another is doing outreach for something else. They all go through the exact same Protonmail MCP server. Same bridge. Same local IMAP and SMTP. No extra services, no extra credentials, no extra MCP servers to set up and maintain.

If I was doing this with Gmail I'd need a separate Google Workspace account for each agent email. That's £5 per user per month. So if I've got 9 agents handling email for different projects that's £45 a month just for email boxes. And each one needs its own OAuth token, its own MCP configuration, its own credentials stored somewhere. Setting up agents that can monitor multiple inboxes across different accounts takes way more effort because you're juggling separate auth flows for each one.

With Protonmail I pay about £4 a month total for Mail Plus. One account. All my domains. All my addresses. All through one MCP server. You don't need a whole Gmail account just so one AI agent can have an email address right. That's insane when you think about it. And on top of the cost savings you get all of Proton's privacy benefits. End-to-end encryption, zero-access encryption on their servers, Swiss privacy laws, no ads, no data mining. I talk more about my full privacy setup in my privacy and security post but Protonmail is a core part of it.

Bridge just gives you standard IMAP and SMTP locally and lets you send as whatever verified address you want. It's genuinely that simple and it works perfectly.

Resend for the contact form stuff

For things like contact forms and automated notifications I use Resend. The whole setup is basically nothing. Sign up, verify your domain by adding a couple DNS records, get an API key and you're done. One fetch call sends an email.

I actually tried using Cloudflare Email Workers for this first and it didn't work because when you've got Protonmail MX records active they conflict with each other. You can't have both. But Resend uses its own subdomain for sending so it sits alongside Protonmail perfectly. You get your proper email through Protonmail and your transactional stuff through Resend and they don't step on each other at all.

An agent can set up Resend from scratch in about five minutes. Add the DNS records via Cloudflare API, verify the domain via Resend API, wire up the endpoint. That's it.

What I've learned from all this

The thing I keep coming back to is this. Every service you use that requires you to click around in a dashboard is a point where the agent has to stop and wait for a human. And those add up really fast. If you're trying to build automated workflows and half your tools need manual intervention then you're not really automated at all.

My whole stack is built around this. Cloudflare, Protonmail, Resend, Namecheap for domains, Supabase for databases. They all have APIs that agents can hit directly. Between them I can spin up a complete new project with domain, DNS, email, website, contact form, CAPTCHA and rate limiting. The agent does the whole thing and I step in maybe once for payment or solving a CAPTCHA. That's it.

What I'd stay away from

Google Workspace is the big one right. The API is complex, the OAuth setup is a nightmare, the rate limits are aggressive and every service has its own completely different API. It works fine if you're a person clicking around in Chrome but if you're trying to let agents work with it then good luck. It fights you constantly.

Basically anything that locks core features behind a dashboard or requires OAuth flows that can't be automated or rate limits you for actually using the API. Those are the tools that will slow you down. The whole point of working with AI is that it handles the procedural stuff so you can think about the stuff that actually matters. But that only works if your tools let it. Pick services that work with your agents not against them. Once you do that everything changes.