Vercel called it "vibe coded"
Episode Description
Cloudflare rebuilt Next.js in a week. Vercel's CEO wasn't impressed. Plus Cursor agents, ChatGPT ads, and more.
Show Notes
Vercel's CEO called Cloudflare's new Next.js reimplementation "vibe-coded," and I have thoughts. Plus Cursor agents now get their own virtual machines, ChatGPT is serving ads on the first prompt, and Anthropic drops version 3 of its Responsible Scaling Policy.
Transcript
What's up, everyone? Welcome to Next in Dev, a weekly overview of all the news I could find in the modern web dev industry. This week, Cloudflare rebuilt Next.js with AI in a week, Vercel's CEO called it "vibe-coded," and I have some thoughts about glass houses. Plus, Cursor agents can now control their own computers, and ChatGPT ads are already way more aggressive than anyone expected.
One engineer at Cloudflare rebuilt Next.js from scratch on top of Vite in under a week. The result is called Vinext, a planned drop-in replacement for Next.js that deploys to Cloudflare Workers with a single command. Replace next with vinext in your scripts and everything else stays the same. Your app directory, pages directory, and next config all work as-is.
This isn't a wrapper around Next.js output like OpenNext. It's a reimplementation of the API surface: routing, server rendering, React Server Components, server actions, caching, and middleware, all built as a Vite plugin. Early benchmarks on a moderately sized app show faster builds with Vite 8 and Rolldown, and much smaller client bundles. It covers almost all of the Next.js 16 API surface with over 2,000 tests, and Cloudflare claims it's already running in production on at least one customer site. But it is experimental, and the whole project cost about $1,100 in API tokens.
The framing is all collaboration and open source, but the subtext is clear: Cloudflare—and all of us—are tired of waiting for Next.js adapters. So, they decided to just reimplement the framework. The "one engineer, one week" narrative is great marketing, but the real question is whether one engineer can maintain something of this size, not if one engineer can rebuild a framework. Building it is the fun part. Keeping up is the job.
Of course, Vercel responded. Vercel's CEO posted that Vercel's security team identified and responsibly disclosed 7 security vulnerabilities in Vinext, calling it "Cloudflare's vibe-coded framework." He framed it as Vercel extending help in the interest of the public internet's security.