They put a massive amount of VC cash into convincing people that Next.js was "the modern way" to create a website. Then they got lucky with the timing of LLMs becoming popular while they were the hot thing, leading LLMs to default to it when creating new websites. To picture that amount of VC cash - they're at Series F, and a huge chunk of that went towards marketing.
Both have been changing as people realize it's rarely the right tool for the job, and as LLMs also become more intelligent and better at suggesting other, better options depending on what is asked for (especially Claude Opus).
I really want this to be true. nextjs is a nightmare. I'm eternally disgruntled.
nextjs is also powerful due to AI. But the value is a robust interactive front-end, easily iterated, with maybe SSR backing, nothing specific to nextjs (it's routing semantics + React).
So much complexity has gone into SSR. I hate 5MB client runtime just to read text as much as anyone, but not if the tradeoff is isomorphic env with magic file first-line incantations.
I have found SvelteKit really nice for SSR, and it avoids dealing with Vercel entirely.
Recent Claude models do well with it, especially after adding the official skill.
I have only recently started using it, so would love to hear about anyone else's experience.
> To picture that amount of VC cash - they're at Series F, and a huge chunk of that went towards marketing.
I guess they should have put some of that marketing money into hiring someone to manage the security of their systems. It's pretty telling that they had to hire an "incident response provider" just to figure out what happened and clean up after the hack. If you treat security like something you don't have to worry about until after you've been hacked you're probably going to get hacked.
> they had to hire an "incident response provider" just to figure out what happened and clean up after the hack
Plenty to criticize them for, but that's totally standard and not something to ding them for. Probably something their cyber insurance has in their contract.
Forensics is its own set of skills, different from appsec and general blue team duties. You really want to make sure no backdoors got left in.
I don’t think they “got lucky”. nextjs is an old project now, and for a long time it was the simplest framework to run a React website.
This is why most open source landing pages used nextjs, and if most FOSS landing pages use it, then most LLM’s have been trained on it, which means LLM’s are more familiar with that framework and choose it
There must be a term for this kind of LLM driven adoption flywheel…
They "got lucky" with the _timing_, as I said. Most popular web frameworks have changed every ~3 years, they got lucky that they were at their peak exactly as LLMs became popular.
Slopwagon?
> They put a massive amount of VC cash into convincing people that Next.js was "the modern way" to create a website
My impression is Next started becoming popular mostly as a reaction against create-react-app.
So glad I decided to just stick with django/htmx on my project a few years ago. I invested a little time into nextjs and came to the conclusion that this can't be the way.
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