_______ __ _______
| | |.---.-..----.| |--..-----..----. | | |.-----..--.--.--..-----.
| || _ || __|| < | -__|| _| | || -__|| | | ||__ --|
|___|___||___._||____||__|__||_____||__| |__|____||_____||________||_____|
on Gopher (inofficial)
HTML Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
HTML How we rebuilt Next.js with AI in one week
mortsnort wrote 1 hour 27 min ago:
It's going to get increasingly difficult to sell software when there is
no moat to replication. We're quickly reaching the point where you can
just tell an agent "learn what this software does and then code it".
koderkashif wrote 5 hours 9 min ago:
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.
CodeCompost wrote 5 hours 42 min ago:
Nice. Now rewrite it in Rust.
Vinnl wrote 7 hours 22 min ago:
That's cool and all, but them investing $1,100 and two weeks of one
engineer's time doesn't yet give me confidence that they're in this for
the long haul. It'll be interesting to see how long the long tail of
remaining issues will be (it doesn't sound like in another two weeks,
they'll have pre-rendering and cache components working), but I'm
definitely not adopting this any time soon.
Also looking forward to Vercel's version of [1] .
HTML [1]: https://matrix.org/blog/2026/01/28/matrix-on-cloudflare-worker...
pu_pe wrote 7 hours 36 min ago:
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 development.
vanillameow wrote 6 hours 26 min ago:
Honestly, might try this in my next project. Just code the tests and
have AI implement against it.
mdavid626 wrote 10 hours 8 min ago:
Either it works, or it doesnât.
Youâll figure it out.
Rapzid wrote 10 hours 30 min ago:
Woahhh... This is direct threat to Vercel's ecosystem capture model.
All those projects they hoovered up then re-aligned and soft-locked
into their hosting business.
I'm here for it.
chris-bzst wrote 10 hours 34 min ago:
The most interesting thing here isn't the framework itself â it's
theapproach. They didn't wrap Next.js output or try to patch it for
Workers. They treated the Next.js API surface as a spec and
reimplemented it on top of Vite from scratch.
The Traffic-aware Pre-rendering idea is genuinely clever. Instead of
pre-rendering every possible route at build time (and waiting 30 min
for large sites), they query actual Cloudflare zone analytics at deploy
time and only pre-render the pages that get real traffic. Power law
does the rest â a few hundred pages cover 90%+ of hits, everything
else falls back to SSR + ISR.
The "$1100 in API costs" headline is catchy but I think the real
takeaway is more subtle: this worked because all four preconditions
happened to line up â Next.js is extremely well-documented in
training data, it has a massive test suite you can port as a mechanical
spec, Vite handles the genuinely hard bundler problems, and current
models can sustain coherence across a codebase this size. It's not "AI
can replace any framework in a week" â it's "given the
right constraints, one person can move way faster than we assumed."
Curious to see how well it holds up as Next.js keeps shipping new APIs.
The 94% coverage number is impressive today but compatibility is a
treadmill.
handbanana_ wrote 13 hours 24 min ago:
I am so over reinventing the wheel in tech, I feel as if that's 99% of
where the money and time goes
vivzkestrel wrote 13 hours 35 min ago:
- since you guys are experimenting that much, i have a favor to ask
- could you rewrite next and react actually without using a virtual dom
at all and use a compiler like svelte instead?
twohaibei wrote 9 hours 7 min ago:
Solid.js might be interesting to you.
syrusakbary wrote 14 hours 10 min ago:
This is amazing. At Wasmer we are a bit concerned of Next.js and this
replacement might come in handy!
I actually was thinking on creating something similar.
Congrats to the Cloudflare team
freakynit wrote 14 hours 17 min ago:
THIS IS THE WAY.
Human in the loop, acting as an orchestrator.
hackersk wrote 14 hours 18 min ago:
The buried lede here is the Astro acquisition timing. Cloudflare bought
Astro a month ago, and now they're showing they can replicate Next.js's
API surface with AI in a week. The strategic play isn't vinext itself
â it's signaling to the market that framework lock-in is dissolving.
If you're a Next.js shop stuck on Vercel because self-hosting is
painful, Cloudflare just gave you two exit ramps: Astro (for new
projects) and vinext (for existing ones). Whether vinext is
production-ready today matters less than what it represents for
Vercel's pricing power.
The real question nobody's asking: if your framework's value can be
replicated by targeting its test suite, what exactly are you paying for
with Vercel's premium tiers? The answer used to be "the only place
Next.js runs well." That moat is eroding fast.
rk06 wrote 11 hours 31 min ago:
as much as people hate nextjs, no one is going to migrate their
production app to a "one week old project"
Even cloudfare mentions that this is still in experimental phase.
In future, it may become something worthwhile. maybe enough for
vercel to kill turbopack for good.
TiredOfLife wrote 11 hours 54 min ago:
Cloudflare also backs
HTML [1]: https://opennext.js.org/
hun3 wrote 13 hours 12 min ago:
> if your framework's value can be replicated by targeting its test
suite,
Side note: this is also why SQLite's full test suite is proprietary /
private
HTML [1]: https://sqlite.org/th3.html
srameshc wrote 14 hours 31 min ago:
I love Cloudflare but not a big fan of Next, I love Remix though :) But
getting to make things work on Cloudflare is a pain, hopefully they
will make it easier with OpenNext. On the other hand , maybe they can
do something better at infrastrucute level , rather than make it
easier, like a lot easier to bring your own JS flavor.
fullstackchris wrote 14 hours 37 min ago:
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 others I've mentioned above.
Just surprised many comments are just stating complaints about Next and
not providing any counter examples, its very un-HN.
adithyassekhar wrote 15 hours 20 min ago:
> 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 claude already has
next's entire source code in it's training data?
thkahfg wrote 14 hours 15 min ago:
Clownflare engineers are in the chat now doing damage control and
downvote opposition. Soon jgrahamc will appear and whitewash the
theft.
brazukadev wrote 1 hour 44 min ago:
what's up rauchg?
adithyassekhar wrote 13 hours 4 min ago:
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.
orangecoffee wrote 2 hours 59 min ago:
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.
adithyassekhar wrote 2 hours 20 min ago:
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.
orangecoffee wrote 2 hours 13 min ago:
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?
efilife wrote 15 hours 25 min ago:
This tells me everything about recent cloudflare outages
csomar wrote 15 hours 34 min ago:
I have done a similar thing with my web app (codeinput.com) and
honestly wouldnât touch this thing for even a fun project. My reason
to migrate was two fold: nextjs simply didnât work with Cloudflare
workers and IBM carbon required âuse clientâ for every page which
meant that no HTML was generated. Everything was client side.
Google Gemini, at the time, created an SSG solution which I had spent
the next 3-4 months fixing bugs for. Consequently, I had to understand
the whole SSG build step and all the wrong design decisions the AI made
that resulted in the site getting a horrible core web vitals score. In
the end, I just put the site behind a white âdivâ that disappear
when the page finally loads. SSR is way more complex than it sounds.
This project (along with the quantum post) is quite concerning. Itâs
not clear why Cloudflare has decided to take this direction. If you
want to know why LLMs are completely unable to produce something even
close to NextJS, a better solution would have been to ask the LLM to
fix the opennext adapter rather than building a new framework from
scratch.
jcuenod wrote 16 hours 39 min ago:
Just you wait, I will post how I rebuilt cloudflare with AI in one week
jryle70 wrote 15 hours 2 min ago:
Do it?
wesselbindt wrote 16 hours 43 min ago:
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 youâd expect to be involved in anything strange or
mysterious, because they just didnât 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.
malfist wrote 2 hours 19 min ago:
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.
brazukadev wrote 3 hours 6 min ago:
is it you, rauchg?
dmix wrote 16 hours 54 min ago:
What the status on Vite Rolldown? Is it nearing production?
dsmmcken wrote 16 hours 55 min ago:
fwiw, I just tried running the agent-skill they provide for fun to
migrate an app-router based next 15 site and the end result is it
entirely failed to start.
Vite just hangs when running vinext dev, with no output in logs
whatsoever beyond printing`vinext dev (Vite 7.3.1)`.
tgman12 wrote 16 hours 56 min ago:
The result of these heists is that no one will publish test suites on
the Internet in the future.
The tone of the blog post is upbeat. What are the consequences? Is the
new performance expectation at Clownflare to "port" one framework per
week? Do you have to generate at least 20 kLOC per week? Aren't you
redundant right now?
tills13 wrote 17 hours 25 min ago:
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.
sgarland wrote 13 hours 42 min ago:
Tbf, stuff gets rewritten all the time.
asdf was the hot shit for quite a while, with people (myself
included) invoking all kinds of shell arcanum to make it faster -
then mise (née rtx) came out, and it was game over. Compatible with
asdfâs ecosystem, but infinitely faster.
Poetry was incredibly popular, along with various other competitors,
and then uv came out.
I get what youâre saying about the AI angle, because itâs
somewhat different when a human takes your crown by dint of pure
skill, but itâs gotta sting either way.
jryle70 wrote 14 hours 50 min ago:
Tone deaf? It's the reality. Developers shouldn't bury their head
under the sand. Chart your course accordingly.
> Rewrote your project
That project would die without user's adoption. Be appreciative.
Nextjs is an open source project. What is it with HN that constantly
praise the virtue of open source software, but downplay that fact the
moment they don't like the outcome?
uthal100 wrote 17 hours 34 min ago:
The most obnoxious man in the middle of the Internet rips off other
people's code. Who knew?
Does anyone have experiences with the EU alternative bunny.net?
sgarland wrote 13 hours 39 min ago:
Iâve been using bunny.net for a couple of years, albeit just for
DNS / CDN, and a static site. Zero complaints with those, though.
samtheprogram wrote 17 hours 36 min ago:
The irony of this in the README:
- Node.js production server (vinext start) works for testing but is
less complete than Workers deployment. Cloudflare Workers is the
primary target.
wewewedxfgdf wrote 17 hours 36 min ago:
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 believe people "rebuilt X product in a week".
Tadpole9181 wrote 17 hours 25 min ago:
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.
tkel wrote 3 hours 56 min ago:
You think Next.js writes a test for every bug?
Tadpole9181 wrote 54 min ago:
I defer to my first 5 words above.
wewewedxfgdf wrote 17 hours 19 min ago:
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.
rileymichael wrote 17 hours 38 min ago:
...and (again), hello world does not work [1]. the ai slop pr [2]
absolutely butchers the fix. anyone foolish enough to switch to this is
in for a rough time. details matter! [1]
HTML [1]: https://github.com/cloudflare/vinext/issues/22
HTML [2]: https://github.com/cloudflare/vinext/pull/31/changes#r28498721...
missing_cipher wrote 17 hours 44 min ago:
Traffic-aware Pre-Rendering is smart
moffkalast wrote 17 hours 47 min ago:
> In early benchmarks, it builds production apps up to 4x faster and
produces client bundles up to 57% smaller.
> And we already have customers running it in production.
Wouldn't be like Claude to maybe forget to implement half the library,
would it?
I guess they can call themselves Claudeflare now ;)
cline6 wrote 17 hours 56 min ago:
The article say that "Next.js is well-specified." I... don't think this
is actually true. It certainly has lots of documentation, but as has
come up time and time again, there are tons of undocumented or poorly
documented behaviors that have been the cause of consternation.
So I kinda wonder, did they just create the framework that Next.js
claims to be but never has been? And is Next.js without the hidden
stuff actually a good framework? Who knows.
slopinthebag wrote 17 hours 57 min ago:
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 the two form implementations for example. Vinext is a
completely different implementation compared to what the Next.js
version does. Is their behaviour actually the same? The rewrite looks
incredibly naive. [1] [2] Either way, pretty impressive.
HTML [1]: https://github.com/vercel/next.js/blob/b8cbaad24ca66ec673a7b1b...
HTML [2]: https://github.com/cloudflare/vinext/blob/main/packages/vinext...
ZebulonP wrote 14 hours 24 min ago:
(to be transparent - I'm a Cloudflare engineer)
The behavior isn't entirely the same and reaching 100% parity is a
non-goal, but there are a few things to note.
This is still a very early implementation and there are undoubtedly
issues with the implementation that weren't covered in next's
original test suite (and thus not inherited) while not being obvious
enough to pop up with all the apps we've tried so far.
As for why it's so much smaller, by building on top of Vite and their
react + rsc plugins there is a whole lot of code that we don't need
to write. That's where a significant portion of the LOC difference
comes from.
TonyStr wrote 8 hours 10 min ago:
Why is parity a non-goal? The blog post states:
> The result, vinext (pronounced "vee-next"), is a drop-in
replacement for Next.js
"Drop-in" in my mind means I can swap the next dependency for the
vinext dependency and my app will function the same. If the reality
is that I have to spend hours or days debugging obscure edge cases
that appear in vinext, I wouldn't exactly call that a drop-in
replacement. I understand that this is an early version and that it
doesn't have parity yet, but why state that it is a non-goal? For
many of us, that makes vinext a non-choice, unless we choose to
develop for vinext from the beginning.
Furthermore, if you're making a tool that looks almost like a
well-known and well-documented tool, but not quite, how is gen AI
going to be able to deal with the edge cases and vinext-specific
quirks?
boarush wrote 4 hours 1 min ago:
Changing the definition of drop-in definitely has me concerned
and makes me not take this any seriously than other projects
open-sourced by Cloudflare, particularly the ones focused on more
critical parts of their systems â e.g. pingora and ecdysis.
slopinthebag wrote 14 hours 19 min ago:
Yeah I'm curious about all the routing edge cases, form actions,
server functions etc, since that is where most of the complexity of
the app router comes from. Does it encrypt captured values inside
closures sent to the client? Stuff like that.
TheFlyingFish wrote 14 hours 30 min ago:
I imagine offloading a lot of the heavy lifting to Vite helps cut
down on the code size.
general_reveal wrote 17 hours 30 min ago:
It is the most passive aggressive thing Iâve ever seen. Cloudflare
team had issues with the Next team? And they responded with âwe can
do your whole product with an intern and AIâ, lol.
Woah.
lioeters wrote 16 hours 2 min ago:
Recreate your competitor's product with an intern + AI over a
weekend. Hilarious!
I hope this becomes common practice. It might even work as an
interview question for hiring new candidates.
rune-dev wrote 3 hours 41 min ago:
So you think a reasonable interview question would involve
spending hundreds to thousands of dollars on tokens?
theteapot wrote 18 hours 0 min ago:
> Most abstractions in software exist because humans need help. We
couldn't hold the whole system in our heads, so we built layers to
manage the complexity for us.
Kind of a sloppy statement, but I don't think it's accurate to say
abstraction or layering exists in software just because humans need
help comprehending it. Abstractions often exist to capture the essence
of some aspect of the real world, and to allow for software reuse. AIs
will still find reusing software useful? Secondly, you equate
"abstractions" with "layers" which aren't really the same thing. Layers
are more about separation of concerns. Maybe it could be argued
layering is a type of abstraction.
redwood wrote 18 hours 9 min ago:
I would not want to be working on Cloudflare's Vercel partner team
about now.. talking about a diplomacy-forward role
eaf7e281 wrote 18 hours 21 min ago:
again?
kundi wrote 18 hours 24 min ago:
Next-js team is a bunch of inexperienced teens who like good looking
UIs and their lousy platform to upsell their services. Very glad to see
this
carverauto wrote 18 hours 26 min ago:
good job, now you have to support that mess that took 3774~
contributors to build.
have fun.
balder1991 wrote 17 hours 25 min ago:
I guess the thing here (which they admit in the post) is that
theyâre 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.
TSiege wrote 18 hours 0 min ago:
What else exactly would you expect for a competitor to do when trying
to take a rival's market share?
ratorx wrote 18 hours 34 min ago:
I find it interesting that they bought Astro ( [1] ), 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, at the organisational level, it still makes
sense to hire the âvisionâ behind the framework, rather than just
clone it. Alternatively, maybe AI has improved that much in 1 month!
HTML [1]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/astro-joins-cloudflare/
willio58 wrote 17 hours 55 min ago:
Astro isnât 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
itâs awesome for that.
paulddraper wrote 14 hours 31 min ago:
But presumably if you could do this for Next it would be at least
as easy for Astro?
ricardobeat wrote 16 hours 25 min ago:
Astro is not a static site builder.
input_sh wrote 18 hours 5 min ago:
Astro has "server islands" which rely on a backend server running
somewhere. If 90% of the page is static but you need some
interactivity for the remaining 10%, then Astro is a good fit, as
that's what makes it different than other purely static site
generators. Unlike Next.js, it's also not tied to React but
framework-agnostic.
Anyways, that's why it's a good fit for Cloudflare: that backend
needs to be run somewhere and Astro is big enough to have some sort
of a userbase behind them that Cloudflare can advertise its service
to. Think of it more as a targeted ad than a real acquisition because
they're super interested in the technology behind it. If that were
the case, they could've just forked it instead of acquiring it.
From Astro's perspective, they're (presumably) getting more money
than they ever did working on a completely open source tool with zero
paywalls, so it's a win-win for both sides that Cloudflare couldn't
get from their vibe-coded project nobody's using at the moment.
selridge wrote 18 hours 15 min ago:
You buy that concern to hire the people. The stack is already free.
pier25 wrote 18 hours 20 min ago:
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.
chrisweekly wrote 26 min ago:
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.
fantasizr wrote 16 hours 39 min ago:
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.
satvikpendem wrote 18 hours 24 min ago:
> 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.
pier25 wrote 18 hours 19 min ago:
That used to be the case 3-4 years ago. Today Astro is very much a
serious contender for dynamic web apps.
satvikpendem wrote 18 hours 17 min ago:
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.
pier25 wrote 17 hours 32 min ago:
What features are missing?
3rodents wrote 18 hours 29 min ago:
Astro is a different paradigm. Acquiring Astro gives Cloudflare
influence over a very valuable class of website, in the same way
Vercel has over a different class from their ownership of Next.js.
Astro is a much better fit for Cloudflare. Next.js is very popular
and god awful to run outside of Vercel, Cloudflare arenât creating
a better next.js, theyâre just trying to make it so their customers
can move Next.js websites from Vercel to Cloudflare. Realistically,
anyone moving their next.js site to Cloudflare is going to end up
migrating to Astro eventually.
thierrydamiba wrote 18 hours 6 min ago:
Can you talk more about this? Whatâs wrong with cloudflare pages
plus Nextjs? Why do you need Astro?
Thanks
bastardoperator wrote 18 hours 29 min ago:
I think they just want steer users/developers to CF products, maybe
not? It is interesting to see the two platforms. I've moved to
svelte, never been a frontend person either but kind of enjoying it
actually.
2001zhaozhao wrote 18 hours 36 min ago:
This is another example that good tests (e.g. Next.js's own test suite)
are SO incredibly important to making the AI able to work on big
projects autonomously with lower steering. So is a very
domain-knowledgeable human in charge of steering.
jtbaker wrote 18 hours 36 min ago:
All my homies hate Next.js
evilhackerdude wrote 18 hours 43 min ago:
> The [next.js] developer experience is top-notch.
let me add my own unqualified statement to that: no.
> Next.js has invested heavily in Turbopack but if you want to deploy
it to Cloudflare, Netlify, or AWS Lambda, you have to take that build
output and reshape it into something the target platform can actually
run.
it's almost as if vercel had some kind of financial incentive to gear
this towards their own platform.
> reimplemented the Next.js API surface on Vite directly
a clown car screeches to a halt; several burnt-out-bored oracle vs
google lawyers climb out and, weirdly, i am there for it
all in all, it's definitely a good example of something we couldn't
have done for $1100 pre-llms, but: should we have? did somebody consult
the lava lamps?
keeganpoppen wrote 18 hours 51 min ago:
i love how this disintermediates the next.js/vercel axis, which seems
to be determined to make basically everything hard except for exactly
what they want to do. as much as i love what vercel has done for open
source in general (amazing stuff!) it is hard to interpret some of the
stuff they do with next as anything other than vendor lock-in bs⦠the
kind that i know is not in their hearts.
hungryhobbit wrote 18 hours 52 min ago:
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. Meanwhile Vite is a
better core layer than the garbage the Next people use, but you still
get the full Next functionality.
I wish Cloudflare the best of luck with this fork: I hope it succeeds
and gets proven so I can use it at my company!
aleksandrh wrote 16 hours 57 min ago:
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 link to their docs and say here, try these steps,
you're probably doing something wrong, etc. Nope. The framework is
just slow. They use simple toy apps to demo how fast it is, but
nobody tells you how slow it is at scale.
lebuin wrote 5 hours 34 min ago:
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.
nicoburns wrote 15 hours 53 min ago:
Damn, that's bad. You can compile C++ faster than that!
paxys wrote 17 hours 37 min ago:
You think you'll get better long-term support from an experiment that
a single engineer did in his spare time?
hu3 wrote 17 hours 35 min ago:
Isn't that how Linux started?
paxys wrote 17 hours 31 min ago:
No, not at all
hungryhobbit wrote 17 hours 21 min ago:
Actually, that's exactly how it started: read Linus Torvalds'
"Just for Fun".
paxys wrote 17 hours 14 min ago:
Was Linux owned by a large company? Was the maintainer
getting paychecks from that company? Was it profit motivated?
Was it released as an AI experiment?
If the similarity is "they are both open source projects"
then so are about a million others. 99.99% of them don't get
any traction beyond the first week.
rovr138 wrote 16 hours 21 min ago:
The similarity is to,
> You think you'll get better long-term support from an
experiment that a single engineer did in his spare time?
Linus started it as an experiment. That's a single engineer
doing it on his spare time.
Do you think Linux doesn't do long-term support right?
The one changing the goal post is you. [1] It is MIT
licensed. It can be used and maintained by anyone.
If it'll get adoption like Linux did, that's different. But
the base is there.
HTML [1]: https://github.com/cloudflare/vinext
hu3 wrote 17 hours 23 min ago:
For all I know Linux started a hobby project from one person.
So entertain me if you disagree.
anonzzzies wrote 17 hours 41 min ago:
I don't get it, honest question (like the others), what exactly do
you love?
chris37879 wrote 17 hours 46 min ago:
It may be sacrilege to bring it into this conversation, but I've
spent the last year building a fairly large community site in Nuxt,
vite has been wonderful, though I prefer vue over react. I am a
little annoyed I paid for NuxtUI Pro like 3 months before it became
free, but whatever.
impulser_ wrote 17 hours 48 min ago:
Yeah, Vercel should have done this with NextJS a while ago. There is
a reason why quite literally every other framework uses Vite because
it amazing, easy to use, and easy to extend.
Everything just becomes a plugin.
qudat wrote 18 hours 17 min ago:
Next is the worst framework Iâve ever used next to rails. Itâs
pure overhead for most apps.
neya wrote 15 hours 23 min ago:
If Rails is considered a worse framework, then I'm pretty much
speechless. Not everything has to be about performance. Security is
a thing too.
Zanfa wrote 10 hours 53 min ago:
I miss Rails so much when working with any of the top JS
frameworks.
Every time I run into an issue that Rails had a standardized
solution for a decade ago just proves that most of the JS world
spends their days metaphorically digging holes with sharp sticks,
rather than using the appropriate tool.
But the industry values overpaying stick-diggers over results,
therefore I gotta play alongâ¦
ryanmcl wrote 3 hours 48 min ago:
I came at this from the opposite direction in that I had zero
coding experience and started learning ~7-8 months ago. I
picked Rails specifically because everyone kept saying "it's
dead" but every actual builder I talked to said "it just
works." They were right. Rails gave me sensible defaults for
everything I needed; auth, background jobs, file storage,
payments...without me having to evaluate 30 competing npm
packages for each concern. I shipped a production app with real
Stripe payments as a solo dev with no CS degree. I genuinely
don't understand how someone starting from scratch today
navigates the JS ecosystem without losing months just to
decision fatigue on tooling.
Martinsos wrote 8 hours 27 min ago:
Shilling a bit but maybe check out wasp.sh, we are conceptually
very similar to "Rails for JS"! Just don't tell Claude to
completely copy us hehe (pls)
Zanfa wrote 2 hours 50 min ago:
Nothing personal and I wish you the best of luck with
wasp.sh, but the constant churn of new libraries that will
revolutionize JS development, but are never quite finished
and are eventually abandoned in a semi functional state is
exhausting and exactly the main issue I have with the JS
ecosystem in general.
At this point, I'm convinced there's a secret global
conspiracy to prank JS developers. For example 1 person
maintaining 3 similar-but-distinct decimal libraries for
Javascript, or the top 3 PDF processing libraries silently
producing blank outputs.
DoesntMatter22 wrote 15 hours 16 min ago:
Rails powers nearly 15 percent of the US e-commerce. I love it.
Any time I have to use another framework it feels like a huge
downgrade. Rails has so many things that make it nice to use
neya wrote 14 hours 19 min ago:
Agreed 100%. I shifted to Phoenix/Elixir years ago but I still
love Rails for all the sensible defaults it provides.
DoesntMatter22 wrote 2 hours 34 min ago:
Elixir is nice but the console feels like the Stone Age by
comparison. That drives me a little crazy
culopatin wrote 2 hours 58 min ago:
How is the elixir job market these days?
vlucas wrote 16 hours 20 min ago:
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 ( [1] ) that
aims to fill the gap in the JS ecosystem for a modern fully dynamic
option that, similar to Astro, makes dynamic islands easy. I have
enjoyed using it in all my own projects. Check it out if you want.
HTML [1]: https://www.hyperspan.dev
switz wrote 16 hours 10 min ago:
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.
vlucas wrote 5 min ago:
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.
christophilus wrote 16 hours 55 min ago:
Itâs unbelievably terrible. I donât understand its success at
all, as much as Iâve tried.
JustSkyfall wrote 17 hours 25 min ago:
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.
igravious wrote 15 hours 37 min ago:
Somebody should port uv to Ruby :/
cheshire_cat wrote 15 hours 20 min ago:
It's called rv:
HTML [1]: https://github.com/spinel-coop/rv
dmix wrote 16 hours 53 min ago:
Why Inertia.js? I quite enjoy not using JS heavy frontends in
Rails by leaning on Turbo and light Stimulus JS controllers where
needed. My experience going hard into Vue+Rails was full of pain
and I've rediscovered why server first makes everything easier to
reason about instead of duplicating tons of logic + dealing with
constant async issues (particularly around automated testing and
complex data loading).
moviedo wrote 15 hours 45 min ago:
Inertia because itâs a plug-in replacement for ruby html
templating aka erb. Try it out, itâs basically the same stuff
you get from erb, without the need for Turboâs web sockets.
You get server side rendering, all the great BE stuff like
server side validation, but no SPA headache.
I find the best DX with Adonis/nodejs and typescript.
lateforwork wrote 17 hours 32 min ago:
Try mvc-router, see here: [1] React was originally meant to be the
'V' in MVC. You can still use it that way and React becomes very
simple when you only use it for UI. Why do data fetching in a React
component?
HTML [1]: https://github.com/wisercoder/mvc-router/tree/master/DemoA...
himata4113 wrote 18 hours 23 min ago:
I mean you don't want really want to use javascript for the backend
anyway... What's the problem with just using vite and any backend of
your choosing?
thousand_nights wrote 18 hours 28 min ago:
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
dboreham wrote 34 min ago:
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.
hinkley wrote 15 hours 35 min ago:
Sounds like Tapestry. Had a friend who loved it but he stopped
talking about it after the 4th major architecture shift.
IgorPartola wrote 16 hours 28 min ago:
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.
mritzmann wrote 11 hours 8 min ago:
For example:
HTML [1]: https://nextjs.org/blog/CVE-2025-66478
rovr138 wrote 16 hours 25 min ago:
Security.
mikestorrent wrote 16 hours 37 min ago:
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
meiuqer wrote 3 hours 34 min ago:
I know everyone loves to hate Angular but it is in a really good
place at the moment. If you don't need SSR and just want to build
an SPA, Angular is the way to go imho.
kopirgan wrote 15 hours 32 min ago:
What do you use?!
nicoburns wrote 15 hours 54 min ago:
> Is there any front end framework that doesn't do this?
React, if you are judicious about what additional packages you
use on top of it.
> I dropped out of the front end years ago, and it seems to just
get worse every year with a profusion of confusion.
This has actually gotten somewhat better in recent years starting
with esbuild which made it possible to use a simple single-binary
tool for bundling.
3rodents wrote 18 hours 33 min ago:
What is it you love about Next that isnât tied to Vercel and
isnât available elsewhere? I love Next too but I find the value is
inextricably linked to Vercel. I canât imagine choosing to use Next
if Iâm not choosing it for Vercelâs fancy stuff.
tengbretson wrote 15 hours 45 min ago:
React server components are dope. Server actions are dangerous but
powerful. No one has a more mature implementation of either of
these than Next.
braebo wrote 59 min ago:
React and RSC are not dope they are a kludge and the only reason
youâre blind to that fact is because youâre React brained and
have no experience with modern alternatives that are actually
good like SvelteKit or SolidStart.
sgarland wrote 13 hours 49 min ago:
It is hilarious to me that the industry has reinvented serving
HTML to clients, but with many intermediate steps, and this is
heralded as groundbreaking.
Vinnl wrote 7 hours 32 min ago:
You'd almost wonder if there wouldn't be more to it.
teaearlgraycold wrote 14 hours 44 min ago:
I still just prefer having a more clear separation of concerns
with API routes instead of using server components. I want my
frameworks to be way less fancy than what Next is pushing out
these days. I get the feeling we're dealing with the consequences
of Vercel employees needing to justify their promotions.
dyllon wrote 14 hours 53 min ago:
Of course no one has a more mature implementation of it than
Next. The Next.js team designed it themselves!
acedTrex wrote 18 hours 58 min ago:
God cloudflare's blog quality has fallen off a fuckin cliff ehh. Used
to be so good now its just llm slop both content and actual writing.
ezrast wrote 17 hours 52 min ago:
Gotta hand it to 'em though - posting this less than a month after
the Matrix boondoggle certainly is, uh, audacious.
Vinnl wrote 7 hours 30 min ago:
I'm actually surprised that this is the only hit I get when I
search these comments for "matrix".
thefilmore wrote 18 hours 19 min ago:
Yup. This was so jarring to read. Shame.
bbkane wrote 18 hours 27 min ago:
This is interesting to my on both a technical level as well as a
social-political level. I wonder what impact "AI-washing" will have
on licensing for example
spzb wrote 18 hours 32 min ago:
The core network products seem to be having a run of downtime issues
too. Maybe they should focus on their homework before going out to
play with the AI kids.
troupo wrote 19 hours 2 min ago:
Here's what is buried a bit in the text:
--- start quote ---
Something like 95% of vinext is pure Vite. The routing, the module
shims, the SSR pipeline, the RSC integration: none of it is
Cloudflare-specific.
--- end quote ---
The real achievement is human-built Vite (and it is an amazing
project).
Since Next.js's API surface and capabilities are known, this is
actually quite a good use of AI: re-implement some functionality using
a different framework/language/approach. They work rather well with
that.
balder1991 wrote 4 hours 8 min ago:
Feels a bit like the AI browser that in the end imported Servo for
all difficult things.
signatoremo wrote 14 hours 30 min ago:
> The real achievement is human-built Vite (and it is an amazing
project).
From TFA:
Vite is the build tool used by most of the front-end ecosystem
outside of Next.js, powering frameworks like Astro, SvelteKit, Nuxt,
and Remix
Are you saying those frameworks aren't impressive because they are
also powered by Vite?
Also from TFA:
A project like this would normally take a team of engineers months,
if not years. Several teams at various companies have attempted it,
and the scope is just enormous. We tried once at Cloudflare! Two
routers, 33+ module shims, server rendering pipelines, RSC streaming,
file-system routing, middleware, caching, static export. There's a
reason nobody has pulled it off.
That's the most important result of this experiment. They achieved
something that they'd wanted to do but couldn't pull it off. Do you
think they are lying?
troupo wrote 7 hours 38 min ago:
> Are you saying those frameworks aren't impressive because they
are also powered by Vite?
That is not what I'm saying
> That's the most important result of this experiment. They
achieved something that they'd wanted to do but couldn't pull it
off. Do you think they are lying?
Once again, that is very explicitly and very clearly not what I'm
saying or thinking.
You could try actually reading and understanding what I wrote
instead of responding to words in your head.
vercantez wrote 19 hours 2 min ago:
Great to see. Could have use this last month when we migrated from
OpenNext on CF to React Router 7
thawab wrote 19 hours 3 min ago:
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.
robertoandred wrote 17 hours 18 min ago:
That was a React vulnerability, not a Next one.
shimman wrote 15 hours 6 min ago:
It was a vulnerability that only could exist due to the incestuous
relationship between React and Vercel. It was something Vercel has
been trying to heavily push into React for years (which is why they
hired previous react core team members).
t-writescode wrote 18 hours 10 min ago:
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 youâre
generating thousands of lines of code with AI.
bryanrasmussen wrote 19 hours 10 min ago:
someone spent over 1000 dollars to replicate the functionality of
Next.JS, even 1 dollar would seem too much somehow. I suppose that is
me being overly retributive.
sailingparrot wrote 18 hours 8 min ago:
> it builds production apps up to 4x faster and produces client
bundles up to 57% smaller.
I suppose that is you being overly retributive indeed.
aggregator-ios wrote 19 hours 14 min ago:
[flagged]
preommr wrote 14 hours 1 min ago:
> I agree, and so do a lot of my peers that code has quickly become
nothing more than a tool to accomplish a task.
Wait a minute, can we at least wait until this dethrones next.js
before making suck claims?
adithyassekhar wrote 15 hours 14 min ago:
> Surprised this didn't get a higher placement on the HN front page,
only 34 points?
Vercel may be bad, but they have been a net positive to the web
landscape, so many projects are alive because of them. And I truly
respect the hard work the next devs put into their code and test
suites. I'm surprised any self respecting dev even votes this up.
paulddraper wrote 14 hours 21 min ago:
Because it hurts feelings?
If someone reproduced the Linux kernel would you feel the same way?
adithyassekhar wrote 13 hours 8 min ago:
If it is a multi million dollar company? Yes absolutely.
paulddraper wrote 11 hours 37 min ago:
Yeah if it is, then downvote.
lovich wrote 16 hours 36 min ago:
> 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 âlook what we built with AI!â article, I assume this is
as valid as Anthropicâs 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 donât 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?
leptons wrote 16 hours 52 min ago:
>The only people that have trouble with this development are the
gatekeepers who think that code should be sacred and revered by
itself. That is a perversion of computing, and we got the wrong group
of people there.
I'm not sure who the hell you're talking about, but I'd guess from
your comment that you have a pretty high opinion of yourself.
somewhereoutth wrote 18 hours 7 min ago:
> Code never was and never should have been the product in and of
itself
Except that the code completely and precisely defines the actual
product. Bad code => bad product.
> code should be sacred and revered by itself
As a production of the hand and mind, code should be revered - if
only as the mark of the human or groups of humans that made it.
> the wrong group of people
The group of people who care deeply about the world around them.
ojr wrote 18 hours 31 min ago:
last time I tried to use nextjs in a cloudflare worker there was a
lot of issues
blibble wrote 18 hours 38 min ago:
> Surprised this didn't get a higher placement on the HN front page,
only 34 points?
looks like HN has finally defeated the cloudflare voting ring
Hamuko wrote 18 hours 50 min ago:
>Surprised this didn't get a higher placement on the HN front page,
only 34 points?
The last time Cloudflare vibe-coded something, it was a glorified
proof-of-concept with TODOs up the wazoo.
cpursley wrote 18 hours 56 min ago:
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:
HTML [1]: https://elixirisallyouneed.dev
h4ch1 wrote 18 hours 32 min ago:
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 I have to do something moderately complicated I
have to reach out for a darn js library and hooks and phx-commands.
Try using native drag and drop or even client-side markdown
rendering. This also leads to memory leaks when you can't properly
detach libraries.
I just say think about your goals; these frameworks/platforms that
promise to remove JS from your life or minimize it do so by
sacrificing something. There's no silver bullet for building on the
web.
But whenever I do talk to people who are debating amongst
frameworks SvelteKit and SolidStart are the two I recommend, it's
easy to host anywhere (unlike Next), you can turn off SSR, just
ship static files with very minor changes (exporting a variable in
Svelte for ex). They're really quick, get the job done, actively
being worked on, loads of resources, discussions and thriving
communities.
cpursley wrote 17 hours 21 min ago:
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.
cpursley wrote 18 hours 55 min ago:
see also:
HTML [1]: https://dashbit.co/blog/why-elixir-best-language-for-ai
jdthedisciple wrote 19 hours 16 min ago:
Shots fired, Vercel folks better hide!
rc1 wrote 19 hours 17 min ago:
> The whole thing cost about $1,100 in tokens.
I like this is called out.
switz wrote 20 hours 1 min ago:
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
without next's very own tests.
Speaking more about the framework itself, the only real conclusion I
have here is that I feel server components are a misunderstood and
under-utilized pattern and anyone attempting to simplify their DX is a
win in my book.
Next is very complex, largely because it has incrementally grown and
kept somewhat backwards compatible. A framework that starts from the
current API surface and grows can be more malleable and make some tough
decisions here at the outset.
Crazy to see it's already being run on a .gov domain[0]. TTFGOV as a
new adoption metric?
[0]
HTML [1]: https://www.cio.gov/
dboreham wrote 1 hour 15 min ago:
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.
ctoth wrote 16 hours 56 min ago:
> 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?
dboreham wrote 35 min ago:
The point is that artifact is not open.
falcor84 wrote 18 hours 34 min ago:
> 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.
seddonm1 wrote 16 hours 50 min ago:
I have tried to post this here but it has not got traction.
I have a demonstrated process here on my blog (all hand written
without AI).
This bit about how to brute force decompilation: [1] And this about
how to do the conversion and address the LLM hallucination problem:
[1] Yes, it is absolutely possible.
HTML [1]: https://reorchestrate.com/posts/your-binary-is-no-longer-s...
HTML [2]: https://reorchestrate.com/posts/your-binary-is-no-longer-s...
dunder_cat wrote 13 hours 58 min ago:
I am curious, have you attempted to do this to any binary packed
with commercial obfuscation/"virtualization" schemes (e.g.
Orean's Themida/Code Virtualizer and VMProtect)?
seddonm1 wrote 12 hours 4 min ago:
No, I would need to find a binary to test on. I suspect it
would produce horrible code at the decompiler layer but
ultimately I would expect that function signatures are still
relatively clean?
Its scary - once you get the differential testing harness set
up it seems to be just a matter of time/tokens for it to
stubbornly work through it.
igravious wrote 15 hours 9 min ago:
There was a recent post on here where the creator of Ladybird
(Andreas Kling) translated a chunk of his novel browser from c++
to Rust in two weeks -- a feat he estimated would take him
months: [1] I, in my own way, have discovered that recent
versions of Claude are extremely (as in, super-humanly) good at
rewriting or porting. Apparently if recently released coding
agents have a predefined target and a good test suite then you
can basically tell them that you want X (well-defined target w/
good suite of tests) written in Y (the language/framework you
want X written in but it isn't) -- and a week or two later you
have a working version.
I have spent the last month wrapping my head around the idea that
there is a class of tasks in software engineering that is now
solved for not very much money at all. More or less every single
aspirational idea I have ever had over the last 20 years or so I
have begun emabarking on within the last two months.
I hear you.
HTML [1]: https://ladybird.org/posts/adopting-rust/
root_axis wrote 18 hours 10 min ago:
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.
falcor84 wrote 16 hours 37 min ago:
Obviously the signal is comparison against the behavior of the
original.
anematode wrote 18 hours 17 min ago:
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.
sealeck wrote 17 hours 29 min ago:
> there will be copyright issues
Next.js is MIT-licensed. Cloudflare's rewrite is... also MIT
licensed...
anematode wrote 17 hours 20 min ago:
Of course. I'm referring to rewrites of other software; you can
easily launder GPLed code this way, for example.
anematode wrote 19 hours 33 min ago:
> The better you document your work, the stronger contracts you
define, the easier it is for someone to clone your work.
Well said; this is my thinking as well. One person or organization
can do the hard work of testing multiple approaches to the API,
establishing and revising best practices, and developing an
ecosystem. Then once things are fairly stable and well-understood,
another person can just yoink it.
I have little empathy for Vercel, and here they're kind of being
hoist by their own petard of inducing frustration in people who don't
use their hosting; but I'm concerned about how smaller-scale projects
(including copyleft ones) will be laundered and extinguished.
judahmeek wrote 10 hours 51 min ago:
> 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
they now have to build credibility somehow to actually profit from
it.
atrocious wrote 7 hours 16 min ago:
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.
judahmeek wrote 1 hour 5 min ago:
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.
verdverm wrote 20 hours 9 min ago:
NextJS is bad enough, cannot imagine an Ai version
Cloudflare also lost my support because their support is among the
worst, rep evn sneered (cannot update my WHOIS, still, after months of
emails). Strongly recommend avoiding their platform. You will find that
you lose more time & money to dealing with the issue of parity. God
help you if you ever need support, almost every question in Discord
goes unanswered as well.
slig wrote 18 hours 43 min ago:
The former CTO commented a lot here and said numerous times about
emailing him with issues that support couldn't figure out. Maybe try
emailing the new CTO?
verdverm wrote 17 hours 29 min ago:
nah, they already lost my business, it seems cultural, which we
know is a hard ship to steer in a new direction, I'm not interested
in trying that again
if said CTO happens upon this, my handle should show up in your
systems if you do do as parent commenter suggests
htch wrote 20 hours 31 min ago:
In hindsight, a totally expected achievement given where models are and
the high quality tests available, but wildly impressive all the same.
I donât know what this means but it feels like yet another milestone
moment.
DIR <- back to front page