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How we rebuilt Next.js with AI in one week

blog.cloudflare.com

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

#211

Post by dboreham »

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

I'm moderately hopeful that LLMs will help here because they lack the human motivations to needlessly mess around with stuff and over-complicate things.

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

#212

Post by chrisweekly »

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 view it as a long-overdue exit ramp for maintainers of Next.js-based webapps to extricate themselves from its overly-opinionated and unnecessarily-tightly-coupled build tooling. Being stuck on webpack/rspack and unable to leverage vite has been a huge downside to Next.js. It's a symptom of Vercel's economic incentives. This project fixes it in one fell swoop. I predict it hurts Vercel but saves Next.js.

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

#213

Post by vlucas »

switz wrote: post #115
vlucas wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The basic premise of Next is good, but it definitely has more overhead that in should, has odd "middleware", and is very hard to optimize. I view this mostly as a React problem though since any page requires full hydration and ships everything to the client. RSCs are... not my favorite for sure. I too have been very frustrated by this, and I made an "Astro for dynamic sites" TypeScript framework called Hyperspan ( ht…

RSC by design does not ship everything to the client. That's one of its basic premises. It ships markup, composed in client interactivity, but you can shed a lot of the code required curate that markup.

I obviously meant traditional React components, not RSC. RSC can eliminate some client code, but they can be very awkward to use in practice, and lines between server and client get blurry really fast. The mental model is difficult for many to fully grok. I say this as someone who has lead engineering teams with folks of varying skill levels. RSCs are not worth the extra complexity and mental overhead they bring.

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

#214

Post by Griffinsauce »

lebuin wrote: post #188
aleksandrh wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird, I hate Next and I love Vite. We have a big (I mean _really_ big) production app that runs on Next.js at work and it's the slowest thing I've ever worked on. I had to upgrade my machine to an M4 Pro just to get local dev compile times down from 5-8 minutes to ~30-60 seconds per route. And my hot refreshes are down from ~15-20 seconds to 5-10. It's _bad_. All the Next.js team does is give you the run-around and…

If you are using webpack, see if you can make the switch to turbopack. It cut my build times from ~1 minute to 15 seconds, incremental builds are down from 10 seconds to 2. Memory usage is down a ton as well. But if you rely on webpack plugins this may not be an option for you.

I've been pushing our apps at work in this direction and it's definitely worth it.

If you're relying on webpack plugins heavily, I'd consider that a liability either way. It's going to seriously hamper your portability to other frameworks and build tools and even new versions of the current ones.

You can easily run turbopack for development / preview environments and webpack for production(-like) ones btw. as long as you don't rely on custom magic.

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

#215

Post by sandywaffles »

pu_pe wrote: post #181

I remember multiple people at HN saying "show me ONE example where AI was used to produce commercial-grade software" like a month ago. Cloudflare alone has posted a couple of examples recently, and yesterday Ladybird was ported to Rust using AI. The most interesting aspect I see in all these examples is that extensive test suites make the work very straightforward. Maybe AI will produce a comeback of test-driven deve…

How is this production grade? The last few things CF posted with AI were outright lies or omitted large swaths of functionality.

If your stance is assuming we have an existing implementation of something in the training set, and we have a robust test harness already, and we have thousands of dollars to throw at tokens, and we're not at all concerned with "works" THEN this is viable then sure? But that doesn't seem to be what most boosters are saying.

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

#216

Post by Griffinsauce »

fullstackchris wrote: post #142

Lots of hate for NextJS in here so im wondering what people use as an alternative framework... Gatsby? I used to use that one until the updates basically ceased to exist. Vite with - looks good, but at initial glance seems to favor just pure speed for any other feature support like MDX, advanced SEO, etc. Roll your own with React and webpack? Good luck, and you'll probably end up with something that looks like the ot…

This stood out to me as well. The level of discourse is incredibly low compared to other topics. Huge amount of "next/vercel sucks" without any constructive or deeper argument made.

There is a similar vibe on the Next.js subreddit, just enormous amounts of shallow negativity. Very strange.

(I'm not saying there aren't valid reasons to dislike the framework or company but the way it's expressed is consistently incredibly juvenile for some reason)

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

#217

Post by wg0 »

koderkashif wrote: post #189

Everything Cloudflare does is half-baked, You don't do anything completely, properly and thoroughly - is that in your DNA or habit. Now, you will not develop it further, it will face the same fate as OpenNext and adaptors.

OpenNext was SST. So was OpenAuth. All from same team that is behind OpenCode CLI.

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

#218

Post by anematode »

judahmeek wrote: post #207
atrocious wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When push comes to shove, cheapness and hype can shove.

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

#219

Post by slopinthebag »

Griffinsauce wrote: post #216
fullstackchris wrote: post #142

Lots of hate for NextJS in here so im wondering what people use as an alternative framework... Gatsby? I used to use that one until the updates basically ceased to exist. Vite with - looks good, but at initial glance seems to favor just pure speed for any other feature support like MDX, advanced SEO, etc. Roll your own with React and webpack? Good luck, and you'll probably end up with something that looks like the ot…

This stood out to me as well. The level of discourse is incredibly low compared to other topics. Huge amount of "next/vercel sucks" without any constructive or deeper argument made. There is a similar vibe on the Next.js subreddit, just enormous amounts of shallow negativity. Very strange. (I'm not saying there aren't valid reasons to dislike the framework or company but the way it's expressed is consistently incredi…

Eh, it's been rehashed over and over again. People experienced with Next.js and other frameworks don't need to read the same constructive, deeper arguments being made ad infinitum. It's like when people say microslop or micro$oft, everyone knows what they're talking about.

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

#220

Post by slopinthebag »

fullstackchris wrote: post #142

Lots of hate for NextJS in here so im wondering what people use as an alternative framework... Gatsby? I used to use that one until the updates basically ceased to exist. Vite with - looks good, but at initial glance seems to favor just pure speed for any other feature support like MDX, advanced SEO, etc. Roll your own with React and webpack? Good luck, and you'll probably end up with something that looks like the ot…

Astro, Nuxt, SvelteKit, SolidStart, React Router (prev. Remix), among others

Vite has plugins for MDX, SSR, etc. You can easily build your own framework if you want in a few hundred lines of glue code.

The criticisms of Next / React are so ubiquitous you can metaphorically gesture in their direction and most people know what's up. It's like wondering why someone said "ai slop" and didn't provide an expose on the quality of AI writing.

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