alt Hacker NewsOne of the things I liked about Next is that it presented a “unified platform” instead of the fragmented sea of hacks that is web development. Eg. I was initially taken aback by having to use a special component for images but then it made sense when I realized the platform handles image optimization and stuff like that for me.
But over time I lost the ability to reason about my Next code almost completely. Sometimes it’s the caching, sometimes it’s some little arcane code differences that turn my route into an unexpected type. There is some logic behind it, I can respect that, but I no longer have a coherent mental model of what the framework / the platform does.
It feels like the reality that the abstractions are trying to cover is too wild not to break through at places. Which, I guess, is just web. But it’s a pity, it felt good to have a saner, simpler platform to develop for in older versions of Next.
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There are some people who see the web as a platform, and some people who see a web browser as a window for zero-install applications to draw into. There have always been people in the latter group who try to abstract everything away, but it does tend to discard pretty much everything that makes the web great.
Similar experience, started in the page router days.
Nowadays no idea what they are trying to do with it, I rather be dropped into a random Spring or ASP.NET project, or even C, than Next.js.
Sadly it is the new darling of SaaS cloud products as extension SDK and deployment partner, and thus the only way to some consulting gigs.
Hard to call it a "unified platform" when a good portion of the developer base is using pages router despite app router being out for a few years now
I have used next in a pretty large application. Also built decently large things with base react (vite), vue (nuxt). Also small stuff using other platforms.
Next is by far the worst thing ever. Everything is broken in a weird way and the deeper you dig into it deeper it starts biting back. It was the only thing I dreaded maintaining.
Now that LLMs write code, it probably is not be as big of an issue though.
Still would not wish next upon any of my enemies.