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!
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.
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?
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.
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).
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 ( https://www.hyperspan.dev ) 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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
> 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.
> 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?
> There's no way Cloudflare could have pulled this off without next's very own tests.
I'm very uncovinced. History showed us very complex systems reverse engineered without access to the source code. With access to the source code, coupled with the rapid iteration of AI, I don't see any real moat here; at best a slight delay.
Source code is one thing; tests covering the codebase are another.
And if you just copy the source code or translate it one-to-one into a new language, rather than make a behavioral copy, there will be copyright issues.
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.
Surprised this didn't get a higher placement on the HN front page, only 34 points?
Absolutely impressive that this was done with $1100 in tokens and in 1 week. I agree, and so do a lot of my peers that code has quickly become nothing more than a tool to accomplish a task. Code never was and never should have been the product in and of itself. This is amazing news, and this is exactly where we should be as a civilization. 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.
While Vercel continues to be the #1 host for Next.js projects, others seem to claim that migrating to their platform is as easy as enabling the Github integration. It's not. Cloudflare even mentions that you can port your Next project to run on its infra, but I couldn't get it to work. Replit markets the same, and yet, Next fails to on there too. You have to go through several painful hacks and try-build-fail loops and eventually not worth it.
You know what took less time and frustration? I asked Claude Code with Opus 4.6 to convert the entire Next project to React+Vite. And as a shameless plug, I was able to get https://jsonquery.app fully up and running and the builds are lightning fast with Vite, and worked with just 2-3 tries on Cloudflare pages. If you don't need SSR and Next routing, I suggest you do the same.
Oh, and in Next.js land, Turbopack had severe edge cases, that I had to revert to Webpack. Esp when dealing with WASM, as JSON Query uses the jq dependency brought in as a wasm to run on the web. This is not an issue with Vite.
>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.
> 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 “look what we built with AI!” article, I assume this is as valid as Anthropic’s 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 don’t 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?
Or just skip/migrate off of the Next.js and other JS SSR rats nets to Elixir and Phoenix LiveView - Claude and Codex are both very good with Elixir now: https://elixirisallyouneed.dev
I see this sort of maximalism a lot where people are just turned off js and say f it I'll use HTMX or LiveView or Alpine or whatever promises that you won't have to write js, and that's fine; as long as you're building generic dashboards and/or the same repetitive UI patterns. And even then you're basically writing JS just in a worse way.
I use Liveview and Elixir for 2-3 home-lab related frontend services; but when 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.
I find it interesting that they bought Astro (https://blog.cloudflare.com/astro-joins-cloudflare/), which from my definitely-not-a-frontend-person perspective seems to tackle a similar problem to Next. A month ago.
If it is so cheap to make something that they recommend using (rather than a proof of concept), why buy Astro (presumably it was more expensive than the token cost of this clone?).
One conclusion is that, 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!
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.
Astro isn’t 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 it’s awesome for that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nextjs had remote code execution vulnerabilities because of how they implemented react server side. I am not touching an AI version without waiting for a while.
Thank you. This is the part that shocks me the most. I was always wary of Next.js for this exact reason (in fact, I refused to use it for personal projects before the RCE because I was scared that I would make a mistake and leak server-side data to the client.
Bugs like this are easy to happen and even easier to miss if you’re generating thousands of lines of code with AI.
> 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.
The bottleneck isn't writing code anymore, it's knowing what to delete. A week rebuild with AI works until you hit the design decisions the original team made for good reasons nobody documented.
The most underappreciated insight here is that the test suite turned out to be more valuable than the source code itself. 2k unit tests + 400 E2E tests effectively served as a machine-readable specification that an LLM could target. This inverts the traditional open source value proposition: previously, the code was the asset and tests were the safety net. Now the tests are the asset and the code is replaceable. Expect frameworks to start treating their test suites as proprietary even if the source stays open.
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)`.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
...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!
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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
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.
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.
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!
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.
Next is the worst framework I’ve ever used next to rails. It’s pure overhead for most apps.
Try mvc-router, see here: https://github.com/wisercoder/mvc-router/tree/master/DemoApp...
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?
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.
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).
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 ( https://www.hyperspan.dev ) 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.
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.
It’s unbelievably terrible. I don’t understand its success at all, as much as I’ve tried.
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
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
> 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.
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.
Security.
You think you'll get better long-term support from an experiment that a single engineer did in his spare time?
Isn't that how Linux started?
No, not at all
Actually, that's exactly how it started: read Linus Torvalds' "Just for Fun".
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.
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.
https://github.com/cloudflare/vinext 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.
For all I know Linux started a hobby project from one person.
So entertain me if you disagree.
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.
I don't get it, honest question (like the others), what exactly do you love?
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.
Damn, that's bad. You can compile C++ faster than that!
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.
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?
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.
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/
> 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.
> 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?
> 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.
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: https://reorchestrate.com/posts/your-binary-is-no-longer-saf...
And this about how to do the conversion and address the LLM hallucination problem: https://reorchestrate.com/posts/your-binary-is-no-longer-saf...
Yes, it is absolutely possible.
Source code is one thing; tests covering the codebase are another.
And if you just copy the source code or translate it one-to-one into a new language, rather than make a behavioral copy, there will be copyright issues.
> there will be copyright issues
Next.js is MIT-licensed. Cloudflare's rewrite is... also MIT licensed...
Of course. I'm referring to rewrites of other software; you can easily launder GPLed code this way, for example.
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.
Obviously the signal is comparison against the behavior of the original.
Surprised this didn't get a higher placement on the HN front page, only 34 points?
Absolutely impressive that this was done with $1100 in tokens and in 1 week. I agree, and so do a lot of my peers that code has quickly become nothing more than a tool to accomplish a task. Code never was and never should have been the product in and of itself. This is amazing news, and this is exactly where we should be as a civilization. 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.
While Vercel continues to be the #1 host for Next.js projects, others seem to claim that migrating to their platform is as easy as enabling the Github integration. It's not. Cloudflare even mentions that you can port your Next project to run on its infra, but I couldn't get it to work. Replit markets the same, and yet, Next fails to on there too. You have to go through several painful hacks and try-build-fail loops and eventually not worth it.
You know what took less time and frustration? I asked Claude Code with Opus 4.6 to convert the entire Next project to React+Vite. And as a shameless plug, I was able to get https://jsonquery.app fully up and running and the builds are lightning fast with Vite, and worked with just 2-3 tries on Cloudflare pages. If you don't need SSR and Next routing, I suggest you do the same.
Oh, and in Next.js land, Turbopack had severe edge cases, that I had to revert to Webpack. Esp when dealing with WASM, as JSON Query uses the jq dependency brought in as a wasm to run on the web. This is not an issue with Vite.
> 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
>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.
>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.
> 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 “look what we built with AI!” article, I assume this is as valid as Anthropic’s 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 don’t 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?
> 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.
last time I tried to use nextjs in a cloudflare worker there was a lot of issues
Or just skip/migrate off of the Next.js and other JS SSR rats nets to Elixir and Phoenix LiveView - Claude and Codex are both very good with Elixir now: https://elixirisallyouneed.dev
I see this sort of maximalism a lot where people are just turned off js and say f it I'll use HTMX or LiveView or Alpine or whatever promises that you won't have to write js, and that's fine; as long as you're building generic dashboards and/or the same repetitive UI patterns. And even then you're basically writing JS just in a worse way.
I use Liveview and Elixir for 2-3 home-lab related frontend services; but when 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.
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.
see also: https://dashbit.co/blog/why-elixir-best-language-for-ai
I find it interesting that they bought Astro (https://blog.cloudflare.com/astro-joins-cloudflare/), which from my definitely-not-a-frontend-person perspective seems to tackle a similar problem to Next. A month ago.
If it is so cheap to make something that they recommend using (rather than a proof of concept), why buy Astro (presumably it was more expensive than the token cost of this clone?).
One conclusion is that, 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!
Unlike Astro, this looks more like a low effort experiment while making fun of a competitor than a project intended for any serious production use.
Maybe I'm wrong. We'll see what happens a couple of years from now.
I'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.
Astro isn’t 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 it’s awesome for that.
Astro is not a static site builder.
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.
Can you talk more about this? What’s wrong with cloudflare pages plus Nextjs? Why do you need Astro?
Thanks
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.
> which from my definitely-not-a-frontend-person perspective seems to tackle a similar problem to Next.
It does not. Astro is more for static sites not dynamic web apps.
That used to be the case 3-4 years ago. Today Astro is very much a serious contender for dynamic web apps.
I tried it about 6 months ago for something I had to redo in NextJS afterwards, it is really not built for those sorts of web apps, even today.
What features are missing?
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.
You buy that concern to hire the people. The stack is already free.
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/b8cbaad24ca66ec673a7b...
https://github.com/cloudflare/vinext/blob/main/packages/vine...
Either way, pretty impressive.
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.
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.
Nextjs had remote code execution vulnerabilities because of how they implemented react server side. I am not touching an AI version without waiting for a while.
Thank you. This is the part that shocks me the most. I was always wary of Next.js for this exact reason (in fact, I refused to use it for personal projects before the RCE because I was scared that I would make a mistake and leak server-side data to the client.
Bugs like this are easy to happen and even easier to miss if you’re generating thousands of lines of code with AI.
That was a React vulnerability, not a Next one.
> 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.
The bottleneck isn't writing code anymore, it's knowing what to delete. A week rebuild with AI works until you hit the design decisions the original team made for good reasons nobody documented.
> The whole thing cost about $1,100 in tokens.
I like this is called out.
The most underappreciated insight here is that the test suite turned out to be more valuable than the source code itself. 2k unit tests + 400 E2E tests effectively served as a machine-readable specification that an LLM could target. This inverts the traditional open source value proposition: previously, the code was the asset and tests were the safety net. Now the tests are the asset and the code is replaceable. Expect frameworks to start treating their test suites as proprietary even if the source stays open.
Warning: another bot account:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47145826
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.
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)`.
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".
I don't necessarily buy it either, but TFA talks about the test suite. They basically pulled 2k unit tests and 400 E2E tests from Next and made sure they all passed.
Even then I still don't think passing all the tests means you duplicated something. That would be a naive understanding of the reality of tests.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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?
All my homies hate Next.js
...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
[2] https://github.com/cloudflare/vinext/pull/31/changes#r284987...
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?
Just you wait, I will post how I rebuilt cloudflare with AI in one week
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.
What the status on Vite Rolldown? Is it nearing production?
Great to see. Could have use this last month when we migrated from OpenNext on CF to React Router 7
> 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 ;)
Shots fired, Vercel folks better hide!
Traffic-aware Pre-Rendering is smart
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
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.
I would not want to be working on Cloudflare's Vercel partner team about now.. talking about a diplomacy-forward role
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?
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.
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?
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
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.
Gotta hand it to 'em though - posting this less than a month after the Matrix boondoggle certainly is, uh, audacious.
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
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.
Yup. This was so jarring to read. Shame.
again?
good job, now you have to support that mess that took 3774~ contributors to build.
have fun.
I guess the thing here (which they admit in the post) is that they’re just porting it to Vite, which is the real champ of the story. The LLM basically worked as a translator instead of rebuilding the whole thing from scratch.
So maybe the project is sort of maintainable, as long as people maintain Vite.
What else exactly would you expect for a competitor to do when trying to take a rival's market share?