alt Hacker NewsCool project! Will surely copy ideas from it :)
A general question for the room: where's the tipping point where you need a "proper" backend, in a different language, with all the inconveniences of possible type safety issues and impedance mismatches?
Because I feel like for 90% of small-medium projects it's just good enough with all the backend stuff within the same Next.js process as the front-end. I just do "separation of concerns"-ish with the code organization and funnel all communication with something structured and type safe like tRPC.
Feels separate enough but very pleasant to work anyway.
Am I doing it wrong?
You're not doing it wrong.
For most CRUD apps, Next.js + tRPC is the right call.
My tipping point was long-running tasks (OCR, AI processing that takes 30+ seconds) and wanting to scale backend compute separately from frontend serving.
If you don't have those needs, stick with what you have.