I get the gist here but I hate the tone of these sorts of posts. Imagine being a NextJS developer, pouring your heart and soul into it day after day, knowing the codebase inside and out, and seeing some dude on the Cloudflare blog bragging about how he rewrote your project in a week using AI. It's tone deaf. It's not impressive.
The tool is hella useful. The messaging is ignorant. This should have been a "we built a tool to deploy NextJS on cloudflare natively" instead of this AI brag.
I partially agree with you, because Vercel put a ton of effort on this one. And the repo (and features list) is massive.
On the other hand, I do believe they drifted too much and stopped listening. As someone else said it - most of the fancy features are used by 1% of the projects, and everything else is buried in hacks and workarounds.
I also agree the tone (and especially the AI brag) is a bit too much. And at the same time it's honest - it doesn't need to be THAT hard and complex. Nor slow :)
That's why I've written an open letter to fix Next.js, to whomever wants to do it (Vercel, Cloudflare or anyone else). Because we have needs, and we cannot play this game anymore...
asdf was the hot shit for quite a while, with people (myself included) invoking all kinds of shell arcanum to make it faster - then mise (née rtx) came out, and it was game over. Compatible with asdf’s ecosystem, but infinitely faster.
Poetry was incredibly popular, along with various other competitors, and then uv came out.
I get what you’re saying about the AI angle, because it’s somewhat different when a human takes your crown by dint of pure skill, but it’s gotta sting either way.
Tone deaf? It's the reality. Developers shouldn't bury their head under the sand. Chart your course accordingly.
> Rewrote your project
That project would die without user's adoption. Be appreciative. Nextjs is an open source project. What is it with HN that constantly praise the virtue of open source software, but downplay that fact the moment they don't like the outcome?
Similarly, a Beelink mini runs one of my Proxmox nodes and it's excellent. Literally sips power, too. I think I measured under 30w while under load. I mainly use it for my Plex instance given the N100 with QuickSync.
> there is a corresponding expectation that today’s engineering students will be trained using these tools so they can enter the workforce higher up the ladder
Either this won't happen, or there will be a corresponding decrease in salary for higher level positions.
That people think capitalistic organizations are going to accept new grads and pay them more _ever_ is a cruel or bad joke.
I enjoy writing posts online and I've been doing it since the days of BBSs and 300 baud modems, transitioning to Usenet and nowadays mostly just here on HN. People seem to find my posts generally informative and sometimes even mention they're well written. In school I always got good marks on creative and essay writing and in the early days of my startups I wrote some of the user documentation and all the advertising copy (one of which won an advertising award). So, I think I'm at least a bit better than average at writing. And I've never used AI for writing anything.
But in the last few months I've had posts accused of being "AI writing" TWICE (once here on HN and the other was on a retro-computing forum). So I Googled through a random sampling of around 50-ish of my own posts going back a couple decades. Damn. 90s me was naive about a few things. And I found three examples which are kind of like that pattern you described. I guess I'm screwed because apparently that's just how I sometimes write and no one ever minded before. And I have proof I wrote that way long before AI did... oh.
It just occurred to me that maybe some of my Usenet posts could be a small part of why AI writes like that. But I was here first! I should have dibs on writing like me. Regardless, I definitely don't want anyone here to think my writing is AI output - using AI would be disrespectful to the community I enjoy participating in. Recently, I've noticed a few times where I start second guessing something I wrote before hitting "Reply" which makes writing not fun. Once, I just hit delete and logged off without posting. It wasn't that good of a post anyway.
Now it occurs to me I'm not really sure what my point is other than venting. So much for being a better-than-average writer. I guess I'd like people to at least be really careful about making accusations - unless you're very sure. I mean, I get it. I hate AI slop too. I enjoy reading good posts here even more than writing posts. Slop sucks. But errant accusations can have a chilling effect or they've had some effect on me.
Oh, wait was that last sentence too much like THE pattern? No... it's an either/or so I think it's probably okay.
And, to be clear, I promise I didn't plan that sentence as some kind of example. I wrote it and only then did I wonder if it might be too much like THE pattern. Maybe this is one of the ways AI destroys community. Simply by making us second guess each other - and then that gets some of us second-guessing ourselves. Shit, I just noticed I used a dash in the last sentence... but at least it's not an em dash, so I should be good. I just suck at semicolons and started using dashes as a lazy shortcut. My freshman comp teacher complained about it too. Wait, did I use dashes anywhere else? Checking... Shit. I did. Now anyone reading this will definitely think I planned that both times or that maybe I'm an LLM. Because no one writes like that. Fuck.
The tool is hella useful. The messaging is ignorant. This should have been a "we built a tool to deploy NextJS on cloudflare natively" instead of this AI brag.
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