Last week, Anthropic released this

marketing video in which they're like,

"Hey, we built a C compiler from

scratch." You know, like we just walked

away and two weeks later was like poof,

C compiler and everything worked. I

could build Linux. It was easy peasy.

Engineering's over. Now, of course, this

led a bunch of people to kind of

actually say, well, hey, it wasn't

really from scratch. He used a bunch of

test suites and everything. But

Cloudflare, when they saw that, they

said, well, wait, wait, wait a second.

Hold my beer. I got an idea. And they

decided they're going to rebuild Nex.js,

JS, which is if you don't know anything

about Nex.js, just imagine a framework

and you put a framework in a framework.

That's effectively what Nex.js is. They

call it a meta framework. Okay, very

metaphysical. Okay, I actually I don't

even get that joke. And they make

outrageous claims about it. 57% smaller

client bundles, 4x faster builds. All

right, so we're going to obviously have

to go over this. We're going to talk

about these claims. We're going to

actually kind of understand the whole

purpose to everything. And even more so,

we should probably talk about the

implications of this. But first, I don't

know if you know this, March 27th, I'm

going to be in San Francisco. I'm going

to be doing an event for Century. If you

want to come sign up, the link will be

in the description. It's going to be a

lot of fun. A lot of founders and

engineers are all going to be hanging

out at the Chase Center. Sports ball. Am

I right, boys?

Yeah. You know me and that sports ball.

Hey, but if we're talking pickle ball,

dog, I'll see you on the court. Anyways,

link will be in the description. Come

hang out. It's going to be awesome. So,

first to kind of understand what's

happening, if you don't know anything

about Nex.js, it's chronically been

known on the internet as a very

difficult thing to host if you're not on

Versel. Open next right here, which was

created, of course, by Dax. Look at Dax.

Look at all that money on him. Classic

DAX right there. It was created with the

sole purpose of making hosting Nex.js

not on Versel easier. And there's a lot

of reasons why this is difficult. No

need to go into them. Just know that

there's some hurdles one has to jump

over to make this easy. Now, what makes

this really interesting is if you

remember with Anthropic,

they used the 37 years of engineering

test to be able to produce a C compiler

that they probably already had memorized

in the weights. But this one is is

different because Cloudflare used the

1700 viest tests and 380 playright

endtoend test to effectively recreate

Nex.js, JS, but instead of having kind

of the proprietary or the turbo pack or

whatever you would call that kind of

build style, instead it was something

that'd be a lot more friendly to say

Netlfly or Cloudflare. And in one week,

they were able to actually like get it

to work. Now, this part actually right

here terrified me. We've been working

with the National Design Studio, a team

aiming at modernizing every government

interface on their beta sites, cio.gov.

They're already running Vinex in

production. Okay. Hey brothers. I mean,

hey, Cloudflare, I love you, but

[laughter]

let's not use experimental frameworks on

the government. Oh my gosh, what are we

doing, dude? It's a fun time. Hey, we

all get to laugh during the SL

apocalypse. Okay. Uh, actually, I have

to interrupt myself uh, quickly. A

couple hours later, I was doing some

more reading on this and I realized that

I kind of misrepresented stuff right

here. 94% of the NextJS 16 API surface

sounds very intense, but if you go and

look at how much of the actual Next.js

JS test coverage this Cloudflare port

actually has it's 13% dev 20% end to end

and 10% production. There are 13,78

test cases and there's only 17380

end to end ones. So very interesting.

One week of having an agent go hog wild.

I mean it's impressive it's made it this

far and people are actually using it.

Still a little worried about that

government thing though. Okay. I just

just throw that out there. Okay, so

let's talk about the claims. 4x faster

builds and 57% smaller. So, we'll get to

the second one in just a moment. The

first one, I can understand why this

happens. First off, they have just

different build systems, so maybe roll

down just truly is that much more

performant than say Turbo Pack. I'm not

saying which one's actually better here,

but let's just pretend like that is a

real thing. But there's a lot of things

that it doesn't do. So, this is a very

important part. this V next or whatever

they're calling it uh this this new

Nex.js Cloudflare edition. It doesn't do

quite everything that Next.js does right

here. Vex does not support static

pre-rendering at buildtime. In Nex.js,

pages without dynamic data get rendered

during next build and served as static

HTML. If you have dynamic routes, you

use generate static params to enumerate

which pages to build ahead of time. Vext

doesn't do that yet. It's obviously

doing less work, but that's not quite

the whole story. This I actually find

this part to be super interesting.

Introducing trafficaw aare

pre-rendering. Next.js pre-renders every

page listed and generates static params

during the build. A site with 10,000

product pages means 10,000 renders at

build time even though 99% of those

pages may never receive a request. Build

scales linearly with page count. This is

why Nex.js sites end up taking 30 minute

builds. Okay, I ever been there. I

didn't know about this. I have been in

places where there are 45minut

Typescript builds. I do get this. So, we

take traffic aare pre-rendering TPR. By

the way, front-end people love

abbreviations. We already I mean, they

just got done saying ISR just just a

little bit ago. Okay, they're all about

these things. So, we built traffic aware

pre-rendering. It's experimental today

and we plan to make it the default once

we have a more real world testing. The

idea is simple. Cloudflare already is a

reverse proxy for your site. They

already know everything that's being

visited. So, why not use that

information and just build the things

you need? And as you can see right here,

12,000 unique paths, 184 pages cover 90%

of the traffic. Actually, pretty cool.

Pretty based, I'd say. All right, so the

next two parts I'm actually very excited

to talk about. So, the first one being

the 57% smaller. Okay, I I'm just going

to throw this out there. I don't believe

you. And hold on, just let me just let

me just let me just back that up for a

second. Okay, I've been around the block

for a while and I've seen a lot of

performance claims and I have been a

part of grand rewrites and I've seen

things be super fantastic and then

become well equal if not worse than the

other one. So, there's only a couple

possibilities that we're seeing. First,

we are seeing the early days of V Next,

meaning that not all the features are

there, not all the things that made uh

Next.js big are there. So, as time goes

on, size will go up and then they'll

become much closer, like within 5% of

each other. I think this is probably the

most likely answer is that Vinex is just

not doing things and that saves them a

lot because the only other answer is

that Next.js has so thoroughly screwed

up. They're sending effectively 2x more

than they need to. And honestly, I

refuse to believe that. Like, just a no

way. I did corner a uh Cloudflare

engineer and I did ask them uh many a

times and at the end of the conversation

he's like it's real and I was like I

don't believe you. That was my only

answer. I just no you can't just do you

can't just have 50% smaller and

everything else the same. I just not

believe in it but in the small chance

that it's actually true. That's

incredible. What did MaxJS do to screw

this up? But the performance does seem

to be like something's going on because

if you look right here, this slop fork

is faster and smaller. You can see right

here, people's P99 times are actually

dropping. Okay, so there's a there

there. I have no idea the validity of

the data or anything. But if this is to

be believed by this Cloudflare employee,

which again, I mean, that's trusting,

you know, the old fox with the hens as

they say. But if this is to be uh true,

then then oh my gosh, that's actually a

dramatic improvement. But the most

important topic is what are the

implications from this? Because the C

compiler was just like, oh, we all kind

of laughed at anthropic because of how

much they just misrepresented it.

Whereas the Cloudflare one, they're

like, no dog, we're running this in

production. Yeah, people are just using

it. Okay, so this one's a bit more real.

And they did the exact same strategy.

The tests were open. They took

everything. They are effectively able to

brain drain it like Silicon Valley. And

boom, they have their own version. It

makes me start thinking that maybe

something like SQLite is what we're

going to start seeing. So SQLite, for

those that don't know, part of their

quality assurance is this test harness

number three. Now test harness number

three or TH3 uh is the test suite is a

private set of test cases used by the

SQL light to 100% MC/DC in an asd

delivered configuration. The TH3 sources

are served on the same server as the

other SQLite repositories but differ

from the others in being proprietary.

The TH3 code is only accessible to

SQLite developers. So think about that.

SQLite keeps a large part of their test

private. Now, for a long time, did this

make a lot of sense? Honestly, I don't

really understand why they did that.

That's not the only thing they keep

private. They also have some other

things that they keep private, such as

this lib fuzzer. It's to kept private,

so we do not want hackers gaining access

to that technology. Sounds like I don't

know what's going on there, but that

sounds like Batman level going on.

And the name of it looks just like a

typo. Like, I mean, that looks

fantastic. I want whatever's going on in

there. But any this actually has kind of

an interesting impact, right? Do you

think we're going to see the day where

say companybacked open source no longer

like makes public any sort of testing

because one can imagine that if you have

a sufficiently large project, you can't

just simply just say, "Hey AI, go make a

copy." It'd be very very difficult. Will

we just start seeing kind of a large

change in open source? Because what's

the purpose of producing all this stuff

if somebody else can just say, "Hey,

that's mine now." or even more

importantly, your competitor can just

say, "Oh, hey, that's mine now."

Interesting. At least interesting to see

what's going to happen over the course

of the next couple years. I think we may

end up seeing perhaps the end of making

money off of open source by having a

company also do something special with

the open source because people so easily

can now copy that. It's a very

interesting future because this fork

that they have created, I wonder how

maintainable is it? Is it are they

permanently just required to live in

this slop universe until someone can

finally wrangle their head around it?

Because the attempt to rewrite Nex.js to

be able to work on other platforms has

been tried multiple times and has been a

failure quite a few times. Cloudflare

even mentions that they have attempted

multiple times. And so what do you do

with this just steaming hot pile of code

that you've now been delivered? I don't

know. There's a lot of just like weird

world implications in this. We are

seeing truly for the first time a major

technology that's going to be used by a

lot of people in which I don't think any

individual can reason about what it's

actually doing currently. The name

well

I don't even have a joke. I don't I I

don't even have a joke to make. Okay.

The name's the premigen. That's it.

That's all I got for you. A gen. Hey, is

that HTTP? Get that out of here. That's

not how we order coffee. We order coffee

via SSH terminal.shop. Yeah, you want a

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Then check out Cron. You don't know what

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>> Well, maybe the coffee is not for you.

[singing]

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>> in hand.

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