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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

#41

Post by pier25 »

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.

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

#42

Post by pier25 »

satvikpendem wrote: post #37
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…

> which from my definitely-not-a-frontend-person perspective seems to tackle a similar problem to Next. It does not. Astro is more for static sites not dynamic web apps.

That used to be the case 3-4 years ago. Today Astro is very much a serious contender for dynamic web apps.

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

#44

Post by anematode »

falcor84 wrote: post #26
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…

> 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.

Source code is one thing; tests covering the codebase are another.

And if you just copy the source code or translate it one-to-one into a new language, rather than make a behavioral copy, there will be copyright issues.

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

#45

Post by qudat »

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…

Next is the worst framework I’ve ever used next to rails. It’s pure overhead for most apps.

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

#46

Post by satvikpendem »

pier25 wrote: post #42
satvikpendem wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which from my definitely-not-a-frontend-person perspective seems to tackle a similar problem to Next. It does not. Astro is more for static sites not dynamic web apps.

That used to be the case 3-4 years ago. Today Astro is very much a serious contender for dynamic web apps.

I tried it about 6 months ago for something I had to redo in NextJS afterwards, it is really not built for those sorts of web apps, even today.

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

#47

Post by selridge »

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…

You buy that concern to hire the people. The stack is already free.

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

#48

Post by t-writescode »

thawab wrote: post #10

Nextjs had remote code execution vulnerabilities because of how they implemented react server side. I am not touching an AI version without waiting for a while.

Thank you. This is the part that shocks me the most. I was always wary of Next.js for this exact reason (in fact, I refused to use it for personal projects before the RCE because I was scared that I would make a mistake and leak server-side data to the client.

Bugs like this are easy to happen and even easier to miss if you’re generating thousands of lines of code with AI.

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

#49

Post by root_axis »

falcor84 wrote: post #26
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…

> 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.
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