We Rewrote JSONata with AI in a Day, Saved $500K/Year | Reco
March 30, 2026
A few weeks ago, Cloudflare published “How we rebuilt Next.js with AI in one week.” One engineer and an AI model reimplemented the Next.js API surface on Vite. Cost about $1,100 in tokens.
The implementation details didn’t interest me that much (I don’t work on frontend frameworks), but the methodology did. They took the existing Next.js spec and test suite, then pointed AI at it and had it implement code until every test passed. Midway through reading, I realized we had the exact same problem – only in our case, it was with our JSON transformation pipeline.
Long story short, we took the same approach and ran with it. The result is gnata — a pure-Go implementation of JSONata 2.x. Seven hours, $400 in tokens, a 1,000x speedup on common expressions, and the start of a chain of optimizations that ended up saving us $500K/year.
Stories like this are data people should take on board when thinking about how they work with AI technologies and the value of them.
I think if you are not working extensively with these technologies, and even if you are, it can be hard to fathom just how capable they are and what their implications might be.
