10 ms·

How we rebuilt Next.js with AI in one week

540 points by ghostwriternr 7mo ago

htch 7mo ago
In hindsight, a totally expected achievement given where models are and the high quality tests available, but wildly impressive all the same. I don’t know what this means but it feels like yet another milestone moment.
verdverm 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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
switz 7mo 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] https://www.cio.gov/ https://www.cio.gov/
- anematode 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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.
        anematode 7mo ago
rc1 7mo ago
> The whole thing cost about $1,100 in tokens. I like this is called out.
jdthedisciple 7mo ago
Shots fired, Vercel folks better hide!
aggregator-ios 7mo ago
[flagged]
- cpursley 7mo 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: https://elixirisallyouneed.dev https://elixirisallyouneed.dev
  - cpursley 7mo ago
    see also: https://dashbit.co/blog/why-elixir-best-language-for-ai https://dashbit.co/blog/why-elixir-best-language-for-ai
  - h4ch1 7mo 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 7mo 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.
bryanrasmussen 7mo 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 7mo 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.
- eglove 7mo ago
  coulda forked it for free
thawab 7mo 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.
- t-writescode 7mo 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 you’re generating thousands of lines of code with AI.
- robertoandred 7mo ago
  That was a React vulnerability, not a Next one.
  - shimman 7mo 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).
vercantez 7mo ago
Great to see. Could have use this last month when we migrated from OpenNext on CF to React Router 7
troupo 7mo 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.
- signatoremo 7mo 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 7mo 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.
- balder1991 7mo ago
  Feels a bit like the AI browser that in the end imported Servo for all difficult things.
acedTrex 7mo 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.
- spzb 7mo 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.
- bbkane 7mo 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
- thefilmore 7mo ago
  Yup. This was so jarring to read. Shame.
- ezrast 7mo ago
  Gotta hand it to 'em though - posting this less than a month after the Matrix boondoggle certainly is, uh, audacious.
  - Vinnl 7mo ago
    I'm actually surprised that this is the only hit I get when I search these comments for "matrix".
hungryhobbit 7mo 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!
- 3rodents 7mo ago
  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.
  - tengbretson 7mo 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.
    - dyllon 7mo ago
      Of course no one has a more mature implementation of it than Next. The Next.js team designed it themselves!
    - teaearlgraycold 7mo 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.
    - sgarland 7mo ago
keeganpoppen 7mo 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.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
evilhackerdude 7mo 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?
jtbaker 7mo ago
All my homies hate Next.js
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
2001zhaozhao 7mo 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.
ratorx 7mo ago
I find it interesting that they bought Astro (https://blog.cloudflare.com/astro-joins-cloudflare/ 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, at the organisational level, it still makes sense to hire the “vision” behind the framework, rather than just clone it. Alternatively, maybe AI has improved that much in 1 month!
- bastardoperator 7mo 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.
- 3rodents 7mo 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 aren’t creating a better next.js, they’re 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 7mo ago
    Can you talk more about this? What’s wrong with cloudflare pages plus Nextjs? Why do you need Astro? Thanks
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- satvikpendem 7mo 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.
carverauto 7mo ago
good job, now you have to support that mess that took 3774~ contributors to build. have fun.
- TSiege 7mo ago
  What else exactly would you expect for a competitor to do when trying to take a rival's market share?
- balder1991 7mo ago
  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.
kundi 7mo 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
eaf7e281 7mo ago
again?
redwood 7mo ago
I would not want to be working on Cloudflare's Vercel partner team about now.. talking about a diplomacy-forward role
theteapot 7mo 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.
slopinthebag 7mo 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. https://github.com/vercel/next.js/blob/b8cbaad24ca66ec673a7b1bf77721db177de5b06/packages/next/src/client/app-dir/form.tsx#L26 https://github.com/vercel/next.js/blob/b8cbaad24ca66ec673a7b... https://github.com/cloudflare/vinext/blob/main/packages/vinext/src/shims/form.tsx https://github.com/cloudflare/vinext/blob/main/packages/vine... Either way, pretty impressive.
- general_reveal 7mo ago
  It is the most passive aggressive thing I’ve ever seen. Cloudflare team had issues with the Next team? And they responded with ‘we can do your whole product with an intern and AI’, lol. Woah.
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  - lioeters 7mo 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 7mo ago
      So you think a reasonable interview question would involve spending hundreds to thousands of dollars on tokens?
  - quantiq 7mo ago
    Yeah, I'm not even sure what this is, or whether or not this is even intended to be a serious project. It just comes across to me as deeply unprofessional. I say this as someone who doesn't even like Vercel and has their own gripes with that bizarrely run company. The docs say that none of the code has been reviewed or tested properly, so how serious is this for people to run in a production setup where many companies are going are not going to be super enthused that their production environment has been 'vibecoded' in a week? It just reads to me like a not-so-subtle middle finger to the Vercel guys. On a side note, I find it extremely weird that the current AI era of software development is turning the state of the entire field into a reenactment of Lord of the Flies. Bizarre behavior all around from people who should know better.
cline6 7mo 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.
- eglove 7mo ago
  The primary reason I moved away from NextJS is the constant stream of bugs. Never seen any framework or library perform as poorly as it past v0.
moffkalast 7mo 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 ;)
missing_cipher 7mo ago
Traffic-aware Pre-Rendering is smart
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
rileymichael 7mo 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] https://github.com/cloudflare/vinext/issues/22 https://github.com/cloudflare/vinext/issues/22 [2] https://github.com/cloudflare/vinext/pull/31/changes#r2849872106 https://github.com/cloudflare/vinext/pull/31/changes#r284987...
wewewedxfgdf 7mo 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 7mo 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.
  - wewewedxfgdf 7mo 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.
  - tkel 7mo ago
    You think Next.js writes a test for every bug?
    - Tadpole9181 7mo ago
      I defer to my first 5 words above.
- eglove 7mo ago
  God speed to the poor souls that have to make it actually work in the long run: "I can say that with some authority. Yes, I'm the one who wrote most of this project, but I'm also the director in charge of the entire Cloudflare Workers org, almost 80+ people at this point. I'm not just an IC engineer who has to find time to justify continuing to work on this. I can literally put people on it, and I've already been talking to the team about how to do exactly that." https://github.com/cloudflare/vinext/issues/21#issuecomment-3956481929 https://github.com/cloudflare/vinext/issues/21#issuecomment-...
samtheprogram 7mo 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.
uthal100 7mo 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 7mo ago
  I’ve been using bunny.net for a couple of years, albeit just for DNS / CDN, and a static site. Zero complaints with those, though.
- pier25 7mo ago
  I've been using their cloud storage and CDN for a couple of years. No complaints. Super reliable.
tills13 7mo 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.
- jryle70 7mo 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?
- sgarland 7mo 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 asdf’s ecosystem, but infinitely faster. Poetry was incredibly popular, along with various other competitors, and then uv came out. I get what you’re saying about the AI angle, because it’s somewhat different when a human takes your crown by dint of pure skill, but it’s gotta sting either way.
- codenomnom 7mo ago
  I partially agree with you, because Vercel put a ton of effort on this one. And the repo (and features list) is massive. On the other hand, I do believe they drifted too much and stopped listening. As someone else said it - most of the fancy features are used by 1% of the projects, and everything else is buried in hacks and workarounds. I also agree the tone (and especially the AI brag) is a bit too much. And at the same time it's honest - it doesn't need to be THAT hard and complex. Nor slow :) That's why I've written an open letter to fix Next.js, to whomever wants to do it (Vercel, Cloudflare or anyone else). Because we have needs, and we cannot play this game anymore... https://please-fix-next.com/ https://please-fix-next.com/ if you're interested
tgman12 7mo 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?
dsmmcken 7mo 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)`.
dmix 7mo ago
What the status on Vite Rolldown? Is it nearing production?
- rk06 7mo ago
  rolldown is in RC. it is open for private preview so they can detect and fix bugs.
- TheAlexLichter 7mo ago
  Vite 8 is in beta, so you can try it out already. See https://voidzero.dev/posts/announcing-vite-8-beta https://voidzero.dev/posts/announcing-vite-8-beta Rolldown is in RC, meaning no more breaking changes (except for experimental features). See https://voidzero.dev/posts/announcing-rolldown-rc https://voidzero.dev/posts/announcing-rolldown-rc
wesselbindt 7mo 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 you’d expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn’t 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.
- brazukadev 7mo ago
  is it you, rauchg?
- malfist 7mo 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.
jcuenod 7mo ago
Just you wait, I will post how I rebuilt cloudflare with AI in one week
- jryle70 7mo ago
  Do it?
aplomb1026 7mo ago
[flagged]
- rob 7mo ago
  Warning: another bot account: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47145826 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47145826
fdefitte 7mo ago
[dead]
- rob 7mo ago
  Warning: Another bot account. This one's a bit more clever in that it's not entirely new -- it's from 2016. Here's some examples from 6 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=fdefitte&next=47067998 https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=fdefitte&next=470679... Comment 1: 2026-02-18T23:45:12 1771458312 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47067991 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47067991 Comment 2: 2026-02-18T23:45:32 1771458332 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47067994 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47067994 20 seconds between its comments. -- or another example: Comment 1: 2026-02-18T20:06:49 1771445209 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47065649 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47065649 Comment 2: 2026-02-18T20:07:12 1771445232 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47065653 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47065653 23 seconds between its comments.
  - tomhow 7mo ago
    Sure, and we've banned the account, but please email us rather than posting comments like this. hn@ycombinator.com.
  - efilife 7mo ago
    If not for the "not x but y" I wouldn't be able to tell. Very sneaky
csomar 7mo ago
I have done a similar thing with my web app (codeinput.com) and honestly wouldn’t touch this thing for even a fun project. My reason to migrate was two fold: nextjs simply didn’t work with Cloudflare workers and IBM carbon required ‘use client’ 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 “div” 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. It’s 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.
efilife 7mo ago
This tells me everything about recent cloudflare outages
adithyassekhar 7mo 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 7mo ago
  Clownflare engineers are in the chat now doing damage control and downvote opposition. Soon jgrahamc will appear and whitewash the theft.
  - adithyassekhar 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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.
huflungdung 7mo ago
[dead]
MarcLore 7mo ago
[dead]
fullstackchris 7mo 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 <insert your favorite here> - 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.
- Griffinsauce 7mo ago
  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)
  - slopinthebag 7mo ago
    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.
- slopinthebag 7mo ago
  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.
srameshc 7mo 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.
hackersk 7mo ago
[flagged]
- hun3 7mo 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 https://sqlite.org/th3.html https://sqlite.org/th3.html
- TiredOfLife 7mo ago
  Cloudflare also backs https://opennext.js.org/ https://opennext.js.org/
- rk06 7mo 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.
freakynit 7mo ago
THIS IS THE WAY. Human in the loop, acting as an orchestrator.
syrusakbary 7mo 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
vivzkestrel 7mo 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 7mo ago
  Solid.js might be interesting to you.
  - balder1991 7mo ago
    There’s even a framework already: https://start.solidjs.com/ https://start.solidjs.com/
handbanana_ 7mo ago
I am so over reinventing the wheel in tech, I feel as if that's 99% of where the money and time goes
chris-bzst 7mo ago
[dead]
- slopinthebag 7mo ago
  gtfo clanker
Rapzid 7mo 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.
mdavid626 7mo ago
Either it works, or it doesn’t. You’ll figure it out.
pu_pe 7mo 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 7mo ago
  Honestly, might try this in my next project. Just code the tests and have AI implement against it.
- sandywaffles 7mo ago
  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.
- solarkraft 7mo ago
  Claudflare has mainly posted vibeslop with accompanying blog posts making wrong basic statements about the project.
Vinnl 7mo 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 https://matrix.org/blog/2026/01/28/matrix-on-cloudflare-workers/ https://matrix.org/blog/2026/01/28/matrix-on-cloudflare-work....
CodeCompost 7mo ago
Nice. Now rewrite it in Rust.
koderkashif 7mo 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.
- wg0 7mo ago
  OpenNext was SST. So was OpenAuth. All from same team that is behind OpenCode CLI.
mortsnort 7mo 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".
dzonga 7mo ago
for most folks -- just user Inertia + Django | Rails
dan15 7mo ago
"from scratch"? No way. It's using Next.js test suites and the AI is almost certainly using Next.js code as part of the output.
activescott 7mo ago
It would have been cheaper to just ask Claude to port it to react-router :)
barrel_maker 7mo ago
Would LOVE a more in depth article about the discussions with Claude and how you created the agents to accomplish this! Would be very interested to know what you found the agents were really good at and what they could improve on. I especially am interested in the initial discussions with Claude about scope, process, and general gameplan. I find that this initial discussion requires a lot of shaping and a lot of input, would love to see more insights into that process from your end! Awesome stuff
cadamsdotcom 7mo ago
This traffic guided on-demand build thing, can it be powered by a file which has a standard format? That’d make it vendor-independent - any vendor could create tooling to generate the traffic file, and you could opt to fetch it at build time or check it into your repo.
xelah 7mo ago
I don't want to argue if this is good/OK/useful, etc. I'm just wondering where this will go? Assuming it becomes so easy to copycat everything you found online, what would be the motive for anyone to do OSS? If it's trivial to copy, no one will ever care about maintaining any of that. They will just keep it private to themselves or the company they work for. And the long-term consequence: we will all have to learn to build all of that ourselves. Yes, with the help of AI, but now the entire idea and architecture must be internal because there is nothing you can copy from. I agree this might be helpful to an extent. We don't need another leftpad or isodd library. There are lots of things we should keep internal and do ourselves. And with AI, it becomes trivial. But if people try to play the whole OSS to their advantage, I think this can end up badly for everyone. This boils down to one thing: If this is the future of OSS, give me one good reason for anyone to do anything open-source (or even source-open). And then show me from what those models will learn... The old stuff plus what you have internally? Have fun with that.

540 points by ghostwriternr 7mo ago

htch 7mo ago

In hindsight, a totally expected achievement given where models are and the high quality tests available, but wildly impressive all the same. I don’t know what this means but it feels like yet another milestone moment.

verdverm 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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

switz 7mo 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] https://www.cio.gov/ https://www.cio.gov/

anematode 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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.
      - anematode 7mo ago

rc1 7mo ago

> The whole thing cost about $1,100 in tokens. I like this is called out.

jdthedisciple 7mo ago

Shots fired, Vercel folks better hide!

aggregator-ios 7mo ago

[flagged]

cpursley 7mo 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: https://elixirisallyouneed.dev https://elixirisallyouneed.dev
- cpursley 7mo ago
  see also: https://dashbit.co/blog/why-elixir-best-language-for-ai https://dashbit.co/blog/why-elixir-best-language-for-ai
- h4ch1 7mo 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 7mo 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.

bryanrasmussen 7mo 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 7mo 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.
eglove 7mo ago
coulda forked it for free

thawab 7mo 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.

t-writescode 7mo 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 you’re generating thousands of lines of code with AI.
robertoandred 7mo ago
That was a React vulnerability, not a Next one.
- shimman 7mo 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).

vercantez 7mo ago

Great to see. Could have use this last month when we migrated from OpenNext on CF to React Router 7

troupo 7mo 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.

signatoremo 7mo 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 7mo 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.
balder1991 7mo ago
Feels a bit like the AI browser that in the end imported Servo for all difficult things.

acedTrex 7mo 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.

spzb 7mo 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.
bbkane 7mo 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
thefilmore 7mo ago
Yup. This was so jarring to read. Shame.
ezrast 7mo ago
Gotta hand it to 'em though - posting this less than a month after the Matrix boondoggle certainly is, uh, audacious.
- Vinnl 7mo ago
  I'm actually surprised that this is the only hit I get when I search these comments for "matrix".

hungryhobbit 7mo 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!

3rodents 7mo ago
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.
- tengbretson 7mo 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.
  - dyllon 7mo ago
    Of course no one has a more mature implementation of it than Next. The Next.js team designed it themselves!
  - teaearlgraycold 7mo 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.
  - sgarland 7mo ago

keeganpoppen 7mo 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.

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

evilhackerdude 7mo 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?

jtbaker 7mo ago

All my homies hate Next.js

deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]

2001zhaozhao 7mo 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.

ratorx 7mo ago

I find it interesting that they bought Astro (https://blog.cloudflare.com/astro-joins-cloudflare/ 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, at the organisational level, it still makes sense to hire the “vision” behind the framework, rather than just clone it. Alternatively, maybe AI has improved that much in 1 month!

bastardoperator 7mo 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.
3rodents 7mo 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 aren’t creating a better next.js, they’re 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 7mo ago
  Can you talk more about this? What’s wrong with cloudflare pages plus Nextjs? Why do you need Astro? Thanks
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
satvikpendem 7mo 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.

carverauto 7mo ago

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

TSiege 7mo ago
What else exactly would you expect for a competitor to do when trying to take a rival's market share?
balder1991 7mo ago
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.

kundi 7mo 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

eaf7e281 7mo ago

again?

redwood 7mo ago

I would not want to be working on Cloudflare's Vercel partner team about now.. talking about a diplomacy-forward role

theteapot 7mo 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.

slopinthebag 7mo 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. https://github.com/vercel/next.js/blob/b8cbaad24ca66ec673a7b1bf77721db177de5b06/packages/next/src/client/app-dir/form.tsx#L26 https://github.com/vercel/next.js/blob/b8cbaad24ca66ec673a7b... https://github.com/cloudflare/vinext/blob/main/packages/vinext/src/shims/form.tsx https://github.com/cloudflare/vinext/blob/main/packages/vine... Either way, pretty impressive.

general_reveal 7mo ago
It is the most passive aggressive thing I’ve ever seen. Cloudflare team had issues with the Next team? And they responded with ‘we can do your whole product with an intern and AI’, lol. Woah.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- lioeters 7mo 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 7mo ago
    So you think a reasonable interview question would involve spending hundreds to thousands of dollars on tokens?
- quantiq 7mo ago
  Yeah, I'm not even sure what this is, or whether or not this is even intended to be a serious project. It just comes across to me as deeply unprofessional. I say this as someone who doesn't even like Vercel and has their own gripes with that bizarrely run company. The docs say that none of the code has been reviewed or tested properly, so how serious is this for people to run in a production setup where many companies are going are not going to be super enthused that their production environment has been 'vibecoded' in a week? It just reads to me like a not-so-subtle middle finger to the Vercel guys. On a side note, I find it extremely weird that the current AI era of software development is turning the state of the entire field into a reenactment of Lord of the Flies. Bizarre behavior all around from people who should know better.

cline6 7mo 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.

eglove 7mo ago
The primary reason I moved away from NextJS is the constant stream of bugs. Never seen any framework or library perform as poorly as it past v0.

moffkalast 7mo 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 ;)

missing_cipher 7mo ago

Traffic-aware Pre-Rendering is smart

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

rileymichael 7mo 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] https://github.com/cloudflare/vinext/issues/22 https://github.com/cloudflare/vinext/issues/22 [2] https://github.com/cloudflare/vinext/pull/31/changes#r2849872106 https://github.com/cloudflare/vinext/pull/31/changes#r284987...

wewewedxfgdf 7mo 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 7mo 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.
- wewewedxfgdf 7mo 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.
- tkel 7mo ago
  You think Next.js writes a test for every bug?
  - Tadpole9181 7mo ago
    I defer to my first 5 words above.
eglove 7mo ago
God speed to the poor souls that have to make it actually work in the long run: "I can say that with some authority. Yes, I'm the one who wrote most of this project, but I'm also the director in charge of the entire Cloudflare Workers org, almost 80+ people at this point. I'm not just an IC engineer who has to find time to justify continuing to work on this. I can literally put people on it, and I've already been talking to the team about how to do exactly that." https://github.com/cloudflare/vinext/issues/21#issuecomment-3956481929 https://github.com/cloudflare/vinext/issues/21#issuecomment-...

samtheprogram 7mo 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.

uthal100 7mo 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 7mo ago
I’ve been using bunny.net for a couple of years, albeit just for DNS / CDN, and a static site. Zero complaints with those, though.
pier25 7mo ago
I've been using their cloud storage and CDN for a couple of years. No complaints. Super reliable.

tills13 7mo 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.

jryle70 7mo 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?
sgarland 7mo 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 asdf’s ecosystem, but infinitely faster. Poetry was incredibly popular, along with various other competitors, and then uv came out. I get what you’re saying about the AI angle, because it’s somewhat different when a human takes your crown by dint of pure skill, but it’s gotta sting either way.
codenomnom 7mo ago
I partially agree with you, because Vercel put a ton of effort on this one. And the repo (and features list) is massive. On the other hand, I do believe they drifted too much and stopped listening. As someone else said it - most of the fancy features are used by 1% of the projects, and everything else is buried in hacks and workarounds. I also agree the tone (and especially the AI brag) is a bit too much. And at the same time it's honest - it doesn't need to be THAT hard and complex. Nor slow :) That's why I've written an open letter to fix Next.js, to whomever wants to do it (Vercel, Cloudflare or anyone else). Because we have needs, and we cannot play this game anymore... https://please-fix-next.com/ https://please-fix-next.com/ if you're interested

tgman12 7mo 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?

dsmmcken 7mo 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)`.

dmix 7mo ago

What the status on Vite Rolldown? Is it nearing production?

rk06 7mo ago
rolldown is in RC. it is open for private preview so they can detect and fix bugs.
TheAlexLichter 7mo ago
Vite 8 is in beta, so you can try it out already. See https://voidzero.dev/posts/announcing-vite-8-beta https://voidzero.dev/posts/announcing-vite-8-beta Rolldown is in RC, meaning no more breaking changes (except for experimental features). See https://voidzero.dev/posts/announcing-rolldown-rc https://voidzero.dev/posts/announcing-rolldown-rc

wesselbindt 7mo 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 you’d expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn’t 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.

brazukadev 7mo ago
is it you, rauchg?
malfist 7mo 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.

jcuenod 7mo ago

Just you wait, I will post how I rebuilt cloudflare with AI in one week

jryle70 7mo ago
Do it?

aplomb1026 7mo ago

[flagged]

rob 7mo ago
Warning: another bot account: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47145826 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47145826

fdefitte 7mo ago

[dead]

rob 7mo ago
Warning: Another bot account. This one's a bit more clever in that it's not entirely new -- it's from 2016. Here's some examples from 6 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=fdefitte&next=47067998 https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=fdefitte&next=470679... Comment 1: 2026-02-18T23:45:12 1771458312 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47067991 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47067991 Comment 2: 2026-02-18T23:45:32 1771458332 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47067994 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47067994 20 seconds between its comments. -- or another example: Comment 1: 2026-02-18T20:06:49 1771445209 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47065649 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47065649 Comment 2: 2026-02-18T20:07:12 1771445232 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47065653 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47065653 23 seconds between its comments.
- tomhow 7mo ago
  Sure, and we've banned the account, but please email us rather than posting comments like this. hn@ycombinator.com.
- efilife 7mo ago
  If not for the "not x but y" I wouldn't be able to tell. Very sneaky

csomar 7mo ago

I have done a similar thing with my web app (codeinput.com) and honestly wouldn’t touch this thing for even a fun project. My reason to migrate was two fold: nextjs simply didn’t work with Cloudflare workers and IBM carbon required ‘use client’ 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 “div” 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. It’s 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.

efilife 7mo ago

This tells me everything about recent cloudflare outages

adithyassekhar 7mo 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 7mo ago
Clownflare engineers are in the chat now doing damage control and downvote opposition. Soon jgrahamc will appear and whitewash the theft.
- adithyassekhar 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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.

huflungdung 7mo ago

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MarcLore 7mo ago

[dead]

fullstackchris 7mo 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 <insert your favorite here> - 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.

Griffinsauce 7mo ago
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)
- slopinthebag 7mo ago
  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.
slopinthebag 7mo ago
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.

srameshc 7mo 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.

hackersk 7mo ago

[flagged]

hun3 7mo 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 https://sqlite.org/th3.html https://sqlite.org/th3.html
TiredOfLife 7mo ago
Cloudflare also backs https://opennext.js.org/ https://opennext.js.org/
rk06 7mo 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.

freakynit 7mo ago

THIS IS THE WAY. Human in the loop, acting as an orchestrator.

syrusakbary 7mo 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

vivzkestrel 7mo 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 7mo ago
Solid.js might be interesting to you.
- balder1991 7mo ago
  There’s even a framework already: https://start.solidjs.com/ https://start.solidjs.com/

handbanana_ 7mo ago

I am so over reinventing the wheel in tech, I feel as if that's 99% of where the money and time goes

chris-bzst 7mo ago

[dead]

slopinthebag 7mo ago
gtfo clanker

Rapzid 7mo 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.

mdavid626 7mo ago

Either it works, or it doesn’t. You’ll figure it out.

pu_pe 7mo 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 7mo ago
Honestly, might try this in my next project. Just code the tests and have AI implement against it.
sandywaffles 7mo ago
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.
solarkraft 7mo ago
Claudflare has mainly posted vibeslop with accompanying blog posts making wrong basic statements about the project.

Vinnl 7mo 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 https://matrix.org/blog/2026/01/28/matrix-on-cloudflare-workers/ https://matrix.org/blog/2026/01/28/matrix-on-cloudflare-work....

CodeCompost 7mo ago

Nice. Now rewrite it in Rust.

koderkashif 7mo 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.

wg0 7mo ago
OpenNext was SST. So was OpenAuth. All from same team that is behind OpenCode CLI.

mortsnort 7mo 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".

dzonga 7mo ago

for most folks -- just user Inertia + Django | Rails

dan15 7mo ago

"from scratch"? No way. It's using Next.js test suites and the AI is almost certainly using Next.js code as part of the output.

activescott 7mo ago

It would have been cheaper to just ask Claude to port it to react-router :)

barrel_maker 7mo ago

Would LOVE a more in depth article about the discussions with Claude and how you created the agents to accomplish this! Would be very interested to know what you found the agents were really good at and what they could improve on. I especially am interested in the initial discussions with Claude about scope, process, and general gameplan. I find that this initial discussion requires a lot of shaping and a lot of input, would love to see more insights into that process from your end! Awesome stuff

cadamsdotcom 7mo ago

This traffic guided on-demand build thing, can it be powered by a file which has a standard format? That’d make it vendor-independent - any vendor could create tooling to generate the traffic file, and you could opt to fetch it at build time or check it into your repo.

xelah 7mo ago

I don't want to argue if this is good/OK/useful, etc. I'm just wondering where this will go? Assuming it becomes so easy to copycat everything you found online, what would be the motive for anyone to do OSS? If it's trivial to copy, no one will ever care about maintaining any of that. They will just keep it private to themselves or the company they work for. And the long-term consequence: we will all have to learn to build all of that ourselves. Yes, with the help of AI, but now the entire idea and architecture must be internal because there is nothing you can copy from. I agree this might be helpful to an extent. We don't need another leftpad or isodd library. There are lots of things we should keep internal and do ourselves. And with AI, it becomes trivial. But if people try to play the whole OSS to their advantage, I think this can end up badly for everyone. This boils down to one thing: If this is the future of OSS, give me one good reason for anyone to do anything open-source (or even source-open). And then show me from what those models will learn... The old stuff plus what you have internally? Have fun with that.