Aggregates

Evidence: High: 2 Medium: 8 Low: 6 No Data: 15

Theme Radar

htch 2026-02-24 20:28 UTC link

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.

switz 2026-02-24 20:58 UTC link

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/

rc1 2026-02-24 21:42 UTC link

> The whole thing cost about $1,100 in tokens.

I like this is called out.

aggregator-ios 2026-02-24 21:45 UTC link

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.

bryanrasmussen 2026-02-24 21:49 UTC link

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.

thawab 2026-02-24 21:56 UTC link

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.

troupo 2026-02-24 21:57 UTC link

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.

hungryhobbit 2026-02-24 22:07 UTC link

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!

keeganpoppen 2026-02-24 22:08 UTC link

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.

evilhackerdude 2026-02-24 22:16 UTC link

> 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 2026-02-24 22:23 UTC link

All my homies hate Next.js

ratorx 2026-02-24 22:25 UTC link

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!

theteapot 2026-02-24 22:59 UTC link

> 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 2026-02-24 23:02 UTC link

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.

cline6 2026-02-24 23:03 UTC link

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.

moffkalast 2026-02-24 23:12 UTC link

> 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 ;)

wewewedxfgdf 2026-02-24 23:23 UTC link

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".

samtheprogram 2026-02-24 23:23 UTC link

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.

tills13 2026-02-24 23:34 UTC link

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.