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How we rebuilt Next.js with AI in one week

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

#201

Post by adithyassekhar »

orangecoffee wrote: post #197
adithyassekhar wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's wild. If I need to steal someone's code, I just need to let an ai crawl it and it'll regurgitate the same thing. I can't wait for it to recreate marvel movies.

I think this framing is wrong. we have to learn to accept that it's not stealing. It's a new world where it's fair use and we don't know how to deal with it. If we accept this then we can do something about it. Without it no one will heed us.

I understand your point, but at some point someone needs to think about morality.

If you or I copied and reimplemented nextjs in a better way, it doesn't feel as wrong. But when a large company does that and then brag about it, it's in poor taste.

Especially pointing out one developer and 1000 usd of tokens replacing the efforts of hundreds of talented developers. There's people on the other side of the screen.

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

#202

Post by malfist »

wesselbindt wrote: post #102

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 f…

In these AI hype cycles "works" is not a requirement for announcing AI did something successfully.

The web browser from cursor didn't compile

The c compiler from anthropic couldn't build stdio

And now, the Next.JS clone from cloudflare can't do a hello world.

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

#203

Post by orangecoffee »

adithyassekhar wrote: post #201
orangecoffee wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this framing is wrong. we have to learn to accept that it's not stealing. It's a new world where it's fair use and we don't know how to deal with it. If we accept this then we can do something about it. Without it no one will heed us.

I understand your point, but at some point someone needs to think about morality. If you or I copied and reimplemented nextjs in a better way, it doesn't feel as wrong. But when a large company does that and then brag about it, it's in poor taste. Especially pointing out one developer and 1000 usd of tokens replacing the efforts of hundreds of talented developers. There's people on the other side of the screen.

The money points hurts yes. We were worth 200 per hour, and as of yesterday were compared to bring 2 dollars per hour, and going down.

The thing is feeling bad or complaining about this does nothing. What else then? Acceptance?

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

#204

Post by brazukadev »

thkahfg wrote: post #154
adithyassekhar wrote: post #129

> We also want to acknowledge the Next.js team. They've spent years building a framework that raised the bar for what React development could look like. The fact that their API surface is so well-documented and their test suite so comprehensive is a big part of what made this project possible. Hi next.js devs, we like to acknowledge the effort you put for writing good tests so we were able to rip it off. You know cla…

Clownflare engineers are in the chat now doing damage control and downvote opposition. Soon jgrahamc will appear and whitewash the theft.

what's up rauchg?

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

#206

Post by dboreham »

switz wrote: post #4

This is pretty fascinating and comes with some complicated AI-world incentives that I've been ruminating on lately. The better you document your work, the stronger contracts you define, the easier it is for someone to clone your work. I wouldn't be surprised if we end up seeing open source commercial work bend towards the SQLite model (open core, private tests). There's no way Cloudflare could have pulled this off wi…

I'm not sure about this. LLMs can extract both documentation and tests from bare source code. That said I think you're correct that having an existing quality test suite to run against is a huge help.

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

#207

Post by judahmeek »

atrocious wrote: post #185
judahmeek wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then once things are fairly stable and well-understood, another person can just yoink it. That transparency & availability for community contributions or forks is the point of open-source. If you're only using open-source as marketing because you're bad at marketing, then you should probably go closed source & find a non-technical business partner. Whoever "yoinks" the package runs into the same problem because the…

Established corporations will be doing yoinking, with a pre-existing credibility. There's a huge incentive to offer these copied services for cents on the dollar, as a way to kill the competition.

Credibility doesn't transfer easily.

Anyone who yoinks an open-source package still has to present an argument about why their offering is better than the original maintainer's.

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

#208

Post by braebo »

tengbretson wrote: post #121
3rodents wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is it you love about Next that isn’t tied to Vercel and isn’t available elsewhere? I love Next too but I find the value is inextricably linked to Vercel. I can’t imagine choosing to use Next if I’m not choosing it for Vercel’s fancy stuff.

React server components are dope. Server actions are dangerous but powerful. No one has a more mature implementation of either of these than Next.

React and RSC are not dope they are a kludge and the only reason you’re blind to that fact is because you’re React brained and have no experience with modern alternatives that are actually good like SvelteKit or SolidStart.

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

#209

Post by Tadpole9181 »

tkel wrote: post #192
Tadpole9181 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't necessarily buy it either, but TFA talks about the test suite. They basically pulled 2k unit tests and 400 E2E tests from Next and made sure they all passed.

You think Next.js writes a test for every bug?

I defer to my first 5 words above.

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

#210

Post by dboreham »

ctoth wrote: post #94
switz wrote: post #4

This is pretty fascinating and comes with some complicated AI-world incentives that I've been ruminating on lately. The better you document your work, the stronger contracts you define, the easier it is for someone to clone your work. I wouldn't be surprised if we end up seeing open source commercial work bend towards the SQLite model (open core, private tests). There's no way Cloudflare could have pulled this off wi…

> I wouldn't be surprised if we end up seeing open source commercial work bend towards the SQLite model (open core, private tests). Wouldn't this just mean that actual open source is the tests? or spec? or ... The artifact which acts as seed for the program, what ever that ends up being?

The point is that artifact is not open.
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