How we rebuilt Next.js with AI in one week
*This post was updated at 12:35 pm PT to fix a typo in the build time benchmarks.
Last week, one engineer and an AI model rebuilt the most popular front-end framework from scratch. The result, vinext (pronounced "vee-next"), is a drop-in replacement for Next.js, built on Vite, that deploys to Cloudflare Workers with a single command. 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.
The whole thing cost about $1,100 in tokens.
Next.js is the most popular React framework. Millions of developers use it. It powers a huge chunk of the production web, and for good reason. The developer experience is top-notch.
But Next.js has a deployment problem when used in the broader serverless ecosystem. The tooling is entirely bespoke: 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.
If you’re thinking: “Isn’t that what OpenNext does?”, you are correct. Continue reading



