How we rebuilt Next.js with AI in one week
February 26, 2026
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.
This is not a wrapper around Next.js and Turbopack output. It’s an alternative implementation of the API surface: routing, server rendering, React Server Components, server actions, caching, middleware. All of it built on top of Vite as a plugin. Most importantly Vite output runs on any platform thanks to the Vite Environment API.
This story has been getting quite a bit of traction in the last couple of days. It’s the story of how Cloudflare recreated Next.js from scratch using agentic coding systems for around $1,000.00 in tokens.
It’s a very significant example of the capabilities of modern agentic systems now.
But my instinct is this is a transitional step in our understanding of how to work with agentic coding systems. We’re still very wedded to the existing patterns and existing technology stacks that we use. But why not just abandon that whole layer that Next.js served?
Of course, in the short term now, we require rewriting everything that sits on top of Next.js.
This way, that code base can be maintained, and the functionality provided by Next.js can be rewritten. It feels like only a matter of time where that step doesn’t make sense anymore, And the code Cloudflare has written on top of Next.js as well as Next.js itself can be entirely replaced with new code that operates at a lower level in terms of abstractions, reaching down directly toward the DOM and its APIs.
That’s a pattern I suspect will see starting to emerge in the near future.
