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!
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!
Maybe I'm wrong. We'll see what happens a couple of years from now.
It does not. Astro is more for static sites not dynamic web apps.
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.
looks like HN has finally defeated the cloudflare voting ring
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.
The last time Cloudflare vibe-coded something, it was a glorified proof-of-concept with TODOs up the wazoo.
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?
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'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.
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?
I don’t know what this means but it feels like yet another milestone moment.
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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.
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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.
have fun.
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.