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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

#81

Post by balder1991 »

carverauto wrote: post #36

good job, now you have to support that mess that took 3774~ contributors to build. have fun.

I guess the thing here (which they admit in the post) is that they’re just porting it to Vite, which is the real champ of the story. The LLM basically worked as a translator instead of rebuilding the whole thing from scratch.

So maybe the project is sort of maintainable, as long as people maintain Vite.

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

#82

Post by Tadpole9181 »

wewewedxfgdf wrote: post #71

I'm deeply skeptical of the "X reimplemented and it was super easy" thing. The devil is in the detail. So many edge cases unlikely to be there. So many details or fine details unlikely to be there. Years of bug fixes. If it is literally a drop in replacement and it passes all the tests, and you're replicating something with and extremely thorough test suite, then sure I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. Otherwise…

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.

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

#83

Post by JustSkyfall »

qudat wrote: post #45
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.

Rails 8 is surprisingly good nowadays. It absolutely still has its share of problems (e.g. Bundler being slow, the frontend story being crappy without Inertia, lack of types which is a biggie, memory) but it is still a fantastic framework imo.

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

#84

Post by tills13 »

I get the gist here but I hate the tone of these sorts of posts. Imagine being a NextJS developer, pouring your heart and soul into it day after day, knowing the codebase inside and out, and seeing some dude on the Cloudflare blog bragging about how he rewrote your project in a week using AI. It's tone deaf. It's not impressive.

The tool is hella useful. The messaging is ignorant. This should have been a "we built a tool to deploy NextJS on cloudflare natively" instead of this AI brag.

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

#86

Post by cpursley »

h4ch1 wrote: post #29
cpursley wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just skip/migrate off of the Next.js and other JS SSR rats nets to Elixir and Phoenix LiveView - Claude and Codex are both very good with Elixir now: https://elixirisallyouneed.dev

I see this sort of maximalism a lot where people are just turned off js and say f it I'll use HTMX or LiveView or Alpine or whatever promises that you won't have to write js, and that's fine; as long as you're building generic dashboards and/or the same repetitive UI patterns. And even then you're basically writing JS just in a worse way. I use Liveview and Elixir for 2-3 home-lab related frontend services; but when…

It's not so much about the syntax, it's about the better runtime. But it is nice to have fewer moving parts and not have to touch JS as often.

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

#88

Post by anematode »

sealeck wrote: post #79
anematode wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> there will be copyright issues Next.js is MIT-licensed. Cloudflare's rewrite is... also MIT licensed...

Of course. I'm referring to rewrites of other software; you can easily launder GPLed code this way, for example.

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

#89

Post by wewewedxfgdf »

Tadpole9181 wrote: post #82
wewewedxfgdf wrote: post #71

I'm deeply skeptical of the "X reimplemented and it was super easy" thing. The devil is in the detail. So many edge cases unlikely to be there. So many details or fine details unlikely to be there. Years of bug fixes. If it is literally a drop in replacement and it passes all the tests, and you're replicating something with and extremely thorough test suite, then sure I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. Otherwise…

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.

Even then I still don't think passing all the tests means you duplicated something. That would be a naive understanding of the reality of tests.
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