988: Cloudflare’s Next.js Slop Fork

Steve Faulkner, Cloudflare's Director of Engineering for Workers, shares how he used AI to create V Next—a port of Next.js to Vite—in a weekend, dubbed a "slop fork" for its AI-generated code. The project demonstrates AI's potential to accelerate large-scale engineering tasks when guided by human direction, focusing on replicating Next.js behavior via its test suite rather than pristine code.

Motivation and Setup

Cloudflare sought better Next.js support on Workers, as Next.js ties closely to Node and Vercel runtimes, causing issues elsewhere. Manual proofs-of-concept estimated 5 engineers and 6 months; an intern's attempt also failed. With recent AI advances (Claude Opus 4.5/4.6), Faulkner tested porting Next.js by targeting its 8,000+ tests, starting with a Friday evening plan to cover app router, pages router, and key features like code generation.

Planning Process

Planning took a few iterative hours using voice-to-text (SuperWhisper) and Markdown files in OpenCode: a main plan.md, testing.md, and later discoveries.md for bugs (e.g., React DOM CJS issues). He guided AI to port relevant tests to Vite Test and Playwright, avoiding full Next.js suite complexity. Background knowledge of Next.js and Vite shaped the scope; AI handled porting tests and implementing fixes, with human vetoes on out-of-scope ideas like ripping out React.