Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How we rebuilt Next.js with AI in one week

blog.cloudflare.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 252 posts

Re: How we rebuilt Next.js with AI in one week

#101

Post by [deleted] »

general_reveal wrote: post #78
slopinthebag wrote: post #57

This is probably the most interesting AI experiment I've seen yet. Looking through the codebase has me wondering where all the code is. I don't know if anyone has had the displeasure of going through the next.js codebase, but I estimate it's at least two orders of magnitude more code than this reimplementation. Which makes me wonder, does it actually handle the edge cases or does it just pass the tests. Like compare…

It is the most passive aggressive thing I’ve ever seen. Cloudflare team had issues with the Next team? And they responded with ‘we can do your whole product with an intern and AI’, lol. Woah.

[deleted]

Re: How we rebuilt Next.js with AI in one week

#102

Post by wesselbindt »

I wonder to what extent you should say you "rebuilt" something when the most basic hello world example doesn't work. And I wonder to what extent it makes sense to call it "from scratch" if you inherit a battle tested extensive test suite from the thing you're rebuilding, and the thing you're rebuilding is part of the training data.

Here's the first paragraph of Harry Potter and the philosopher's stone. I rewrote it from scratch, apparently:

Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you’d expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn’t hold with such nonsense. Mr. Dursley was the director of a firm called Grunnings, which made drills. He was a big, beefy man with hardly any neck, although he did have a very large mustache.

Re: How we rebuilt Next.js with AI in one week

#104

Post by fantasizr »

pier25 wrote: post #41
ratorx wrote: post #25

I find it interesting that they bought Astro ( https://blog.cloudflare.com/astro-joins-cloudflare/ ), which from my definitely-not-a-frontend-person perspective seems to tackle a similar problem to Next. A month ago. If it is so cheap to make something that they recommend using (rather than a proof of concept), why buy Astro (presumably it was more expensive than the token cost of this clone?). One conclusion is that…

Unlike Astro, this looks more like a low effort experiment while making fun of a competitor than a project intended for any serious production use. Maybe I'm wrong. We'll see what happens a couple of years from now.

I'm very patient with the ai-led porting projects since they're revealed with a big engagement splash on social media. Could it be durable? sure but I doubt anyone is in that much of a rush to migrate to a project built in a week either.

Re: How we rebuilt Next.js with AI in one week

#105

Post by falcor84 »

root_axis wrote: post #49
falcor84 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's no way Cloudflare could have pulled this off without next's very own tests. I'm very uncovinced. History showed us very complex systems reverse engineered without access to the source code. With access to the source code, coupled with the rapid iteration of AI, I don't see any real moat here; at best a slight delay.

The tests are absolutely essential, otherwise there's no signal to guide the LLM towards correct behavior and hallucinations accumulate until any hope of forward progress collapses.

Obviously the signal is comparison against the behavior of the original.

Re: How we rebuilt Next.js with AI in one week

#106

Post by mikestorrent »

thousand_nights wrote: post #33
hungryhobbit wrote: post #16

Man, I love Next ... but I also love Vite ... and I hate the Next team, because they focus on fancy new features for 0.1% of their users, at the complete expense of the other 99.9% of the Next community (who they basically ignore). This gives someone like me everything we want. Better performance is something the Next community has been begging for for years: the Next team ignored them, but not the Cloudflare team. M…

at my job we have some 7+ year old nextjs apps that don't receive new features but still do their jobs perfectly fine, and they keep changing random shit around for no reason, we've had to waste time on multiple refactors already for major nextjs version bumps once the older ones are no longer supported

Is there any front end framework that doesn't do this? I dropped out of the front end years ago, and it seems to just get worse every year with a profusion of confusion. Doesn't anyone yearn for back when we didn't have to build the front end at all?? Just emit some HTML and serve up some JS files from the backend, and everything just flows from there?

Someone go make an AI rewrite of Apache+Mod-PHP and sell it to zoomers as the hip new thing already please

Re: How we rebuilt Next.js with AI in one week

#107

Post by lovich »

aggregator-ios wrote: post #8

[flagged]

> Surprised this didn't get a higher placement on the HN front page, only 34 points?

Without spending the time on reading through all the details for the umpteenth “look what we built with AI!” article, I assume this is as valid as Anthropic’s claim about building a C++ compiler a few weeks ago where, when you looked under the hood, it was still relying on existing compilers.

Like OK, I really don’t believe the claims to begin with, but even if I do take them at face value, you just recreated something already existing and working for years?

Re: How we rebuilt Next.js with AI in one week

#108

Post by IgorPartola »

thousand_nights wrote: post #33
hungryhobbit wrote: post #16

Man, I love Next ... but I also love Vite ... and I hate the Next team, because they focus on fancy new features for 0.1% of their users, at the complete expense of the other 99.9% of the Next community (who they basically ignore). This gives someone like me everything we want. Better performance is something the Next community has been begging for for years: the Next team ignored them, but not the Cloudflare team. M…

at my job we have some 7+ year old nextjs apps that don't receive new features but still do their jobs perfectly fine, and they keep changing random shit around for no reason, we've had to waste time on multiple refactors already for major nextjs version bumps once the older ones are no longer supported

Is there any reason to keep upgrading if the apps keep doing their jobs perfectly fine? Pull in a stable version of the framework and the associated docs and stay there.

Re: How we rebuilt Next.js with AI in one week

#110

Post by ricardobeat »

willio58 wrote: post #60
ratorx wrote: post #25

I find it interesting that they bought Astro ( https://blog.cloudflare.com/astro-joins-cloudflare/ ), which from my definitely-not-a-frontend-person perspective seems to tackle a similar problem to Next. A month ago. If it is so cheap to make something that they recommend using (rather than a proof of concept), why buy Astro (presumably it was more expensive than the token cost of this clone?). One conclusion is that…

Astro isn’t solving the same surface as next. Astro is great for static sites with some dynamic behavior. The same could be said about next depending on how you write your code, but next can also be used for highly dynamic websites. Using Astro for highly dynamic websites is like jamming a square peg into a round hole. We use Astro for our internal dev documentation/design system and it’s awesome for that.

Astro is not a static site builder.
Post reply on HN