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/

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!

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.

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!

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.

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.

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".

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.

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?

I like this is called out.

- Node.js production server (vinext start) works for testing but is less complete than Workers deployment. Cloudflare Workers is the primary target.

I don’t know what this means but it feels like yet another milestone moment.

If you're a Next.js shop stuck on Vercel because self-hosting is painful, Cloudflare just gave you two exit ramps: Astro (for new projects) and vinext (for existing ones). Whether vinext is production-ready today matters less than what it represents for Vercel's pricing power.

The real question nobody's asking: if your framework's value can be replicated by targeting its test suite, what exactly are you paying for with Vercel's premium tiers? The answer used to be "the only place Next.js runs well." That moat is eroding fast.

Now, you will not develop it further, it will face the same fate as OpenNext and adaptors.

Vite just hangs when running vinext dev, with no output in logs whatsoever beyond printing`vinext dev (Vite 7.3.1)`.

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.

--- 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.

[1] https://github.com/cloudflare/vinext/issues/22

[2] https://github.com/cloudflare/vinext/pull/31/changes#r284987...

I'm here for it.

- could you rewrite next and react actually without using a virtual dom at all and use a compiler like svelte instead?

I actually was thinking on creating something similar. Congrats to the Cloudflare team

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.

Also looking forward to Vercel's version of https://matrix.org/blog/2026/01/28/matrix-on-cloudflare-work....

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?

You’ll figure it out.

> 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 ;)

Human in the loop, acting as an orchestrator.

Does anyone have experiences with the EU alternative bunny.net?

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?

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.

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.

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.

have fun.

The Traffic-aware Pre-rendering idea is genuinely clever. Instead of pre-rendering every possible route at build time (and waiting 30 min for large sites), they query actual Cloudflare zone analytics at deploy time and only pre-render the pages that get real traffic. Power law does the rest — a few hundred pages cover 90%+ of hits, everything else falls back to SSR + ISR.

The "$1100 in API costs" headline is catchy but I think the real takeaway is more subtle: this worked because all four preconditions happened to line up — Next.js is extremely well-documented in training data, it has a massive test suite you can port as a mechanical spec, Vite handles the genuinely hard bundler problems, and current models can sustain coherence across a codebase this size. It's not "AI can replace any framework in a week" — it's "given the right constraints, one person can move way faster than we assumed."

Curious to see how well it holds up as Next.js keeps shipping new APIs. The 94% coverage number is impressive today but compatibility is a treadmill.