The Pragmatic Engineer

The Pragmatic Engineer

The Pulse

The Pulse: Cloudflare rewrites Next.js as AI rewrites commercial open source

An engineer at Cloudflare rewrote most of Vercel’s Next.js in one week with AI agents. It looks like a sign of how AI will disrupt existing moats and business models. Analysis

Gergely Orosz's avatar
Gergely Orosz
Feb 26, 2026
∙ Paid

Today’s issue of The Pulse focuses on a single event because it’s a significant one with major potential ripple effects. On Tuesday, Cloudflare shocked the dev world by announcing that they have rewritten Next.js in just one week, with a single developer who used only $1,100 in tokens:

Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht on X

There are several layers to dig into h…

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