Syntax - Tasty Web Development Treats · Wes Bos & Scott Tolinski - Full Stack JavaScript Web Developers

988: Cloudflare’s Next.js Slop Fork

March 18, 2026·47 min·4 clips

Steve Faulkner used AI to port Next.js to Vite in a weekend, after human attempts failed for months.

Syntax is a web development podcast hosted by Wes Bos and Scott Tolinski. This episode features Steve Faulkner, Director of Engineering for Cloudflare Workers — the serverless compute platform — and surrounding products including agents, containers, and the Wrangler CLI. Faulkner manages a team of roughly 80 engineers. The episode's subject is a project that drew significant attention in the developer community: Cloudflare took Next.js and ported it to run on Vite, a faster JavaScript build tool, and published the result. The internet quickly coined the term 'slop fork' — a fork written primarily by AI with a human directing it — and Faulkner says he immediately loved the term. He explains the backstory: for about a year, Cloudflare had been trying to find a path to better Next.js support. Next.js's build and runtime system is deeply coupled to Node.js APIs and Vercel-specific infrastructure, meaning that while it can be hosted elsewhere, edge cases and advanced features often break. Conventional approaches included writing a custom compiler for the Next.js API surface, but these stalled. The newer approach — which Faulkner describes as AI as an amplification factor — used AI tools extensively to take the Next.js test suite as a specification and rewrite the implementation layer to run on Vite. Faulkner is careful to say AI works in both directions: it amplifies correct direction rapidly, but if the direction is wrong it also accelerates mistakes. The key human contribution was knowing what needed to be built and verifying the output. The term 'hundred X engineering manager' comes up, describing how AI has reshaped the leverage available to someone who knows what they want to build. The hosts discuss whether this approach — testing as specification, AI as implementer — represents a broader shift in how complex software will be built.

As heard by us

A practical episode on framework cloning, agent feedback loops, and the work of rebuilding software.

Steve Faulkner, creator of VNEX, uses the Cloudflare effort to port Next.js to Vite as a starting point, but the stronger material is the method behind it.

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You want the story behind Cloudflare's Next.js-to-Vite fork.

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