#MAINTENANCE

Cloudflare rewrites Next.js as AI rewrites commercial open source - The Pragmatic Engineer

Pre-AI, this reimplementation would have taken years of engineering time to complete. Doing what Cloudflare did was always possible in theory, but never seemed practical.

Separately but relatedly, Cloudflare has now proved that the cost of rewriting existing software has become ~100x cheaper, thanks to AI, and this economy is likely to be the case for maintenance, too. Considering how trivial it was to rebuild one of the more complex open source projects, this augurs well for it being trivial and much cheaper to maintain in the future.

Over the last few days, I’ve been reading some excerpts from Stewart Brand’s new book Maintenance: Of Everything. He is sharing them through Book in Progress, a platform where readers can share early feedback with the author.

If the topic is of any interest to you, go check’em out, they are a great read. I can’t wait for the whole book to be released.

Ps. The book begins with The Maintenance Race, which a couple of years ago was released as a short audiobook (~1h) on Audible.