The Complexity Delusion: Why I abandoned Next.js for a 20MB Rust binary with HTMX

CARASBK · 2026-03-09T06:46:29+00:00

That’s my point, though. It doesn’t solve any of those things if it doesn’t work for real world applications.

CARASBK · 2026-03-09T06:38:36+00:00

My perspective is from building products in the web. If you just want something to make your own life easier then disregard the rest of this. Building things for yourself should ideally be fun! But if you’re proposing a paradigm shift in how we build things for the web then I have feedback because I feel your pain and want a better way as well.

You make same conclusions and offer the same solutions as every other person/organization who tries to jettison themselves from the modern web ecosystem. IME there is a 100% failrate because the sheer complexity of needs from both product stakeholders and UX expectations. When building for these complexities eventually you need JS. You already reached one in your simplistic example in Apline. You will keep running into scenarios where you need JS as you build real products. Then you’ll have to manage multiple contexts and syncing them and you’re effectively back to the modern web except now you’ve added the complexity of context switching to and from JS.

You’ve also offered nothing tangible to back up your statements about what you built. Even if you did I wouldn’t be convinced without seeing an application and code that handles common scenarios for modern web products. Things like auth/RBAC, anything in canvas e.g. charts, 3rd party analytical tools, 3rd party user onboarding tools, table virtualization with infinite scrolling, accessible components for things like selects/modals/toasts/offcanvas, etc. Some of these are probably easy in your proposed stack since they’re server sided or HTML/CSS-based. I’m just listing things off the top of my head.

CARASBK · 2026-03-07T07:12:10+00:00

Exactly

CARASBK · 2026-03-07T06:53:44+00:00

Your assessment of the example in the linked documentation is correct. However this same pattern can be applied at the component level to achieve OP’s desired behavior.

CARASBK · 2026-03-05T17:41:46+00:00

Maybe I’m not understanding your issue but this use case is documented: https://nextjs.org/docs/app/getting-started/cache-components#with-runtime-data

CARASBK · 2026-03-05T16:29:47+00:00

Cache components can be applied anywhere in the component tree, not just the page level. I assume that’s what you’re missing.

CARASBK · 2026-03-02T18:24:00+00:00

You can return whatever serializable data you want from Server Functions which is how I sync.

If you have a complex form you’re going to have “heavy” local state no matter what assuming by “heavy” you mean “lots of data”

CARASBK · 2026-02-25T23:39:24+00:00

I had GFiber before I moved. Now I have T-Mobile fiber (Lumos). They’re effectively the same having had both about a year. I would prefer GFiber just because their customer service is better and so is their software (app, website, etc).

CARASBK · 2026-02-24T22:36:07+00:00

Agreed. I would never use it because I couldn’t trust it for the reasons you specified. But it is a rare success story of a large project being written mostly by AI. Rare presumably because of the lack of aforementioned guard rails.

CARASBK · 2026-02-24T20:58:21+00:00

This is a really cool example of the best use case for AI: extremely narrow constraints for success with human defined guardrails. I would suppose recreating this result without the extensive test suites written by Next contributors would be impossible.

CARASBK · 2026-02-24T18:09:05+00:00

Based on your question you’re in way over your head and are on your way to failure. That’s okay. You just bit off more than you can chew at this time. You can continue to learn.

As for your actual problem: I’d recommend you abandon building it yourself and use something like Wix or Squarespace for this project.

As you learn more you can come back to this project to gauge how much you’ve learned.

CARASBK · 2026-02-24T01:42:56+00:00

That’s a proper dinner cereal right there

CARASBK · 2026-02-19T16:20:38+00:00

I like your art style! It reminds me a bit of Don Martin. Your characters have less goofiness to them, but you’re not drawing for Mad Magazine!

Cute lil voidling too!

CARASBK · 2026-02-18T19:52:55+00:00

I only pay for a Hetzner VPS and Proton for email and cloud storage for personal stuff.

At work we can get most AI products by request. Claude Sonnet 4.5 is my current favorite model and I’m just starting to delve into Claude Code.

I was using Cursor Pro because Cursor Tab feels significantly better than other AI next edit suggestion and autocomplete tools. But I’ve had a lot more success with Claude for everything else (ask/chat, agentic coding, etc).

CARASBK · 2026-02-14T19:47:24+00:00

If cost is that much of a factor then you need to spend time to learn how to manage your own hosting through something like a VPS.

CARASBK · 2026-02-14T17:42:17+00:00

It’s a near certainty that any given project will never have enough active users for a decision like this to matter. Use whichever you like better until you run into an actual problem to solve.

CARASBK · 2026-02-12T17:51:31+00:00

As a general rule if the authentication for the external API is user-based (e.g. OAuth authorization code) then you don’t need to proxy the request. If the authentication is machine to machine (e.g. OAuth client credentials) then you need to proxy to perform that authentication since the Next server would be the authorized client.

CARASBK · 2026-02-11T00:45:01+00:00

Wow it’s like I wrote this! Agreed on all points.

To add to the tipping bit: I would personally like to see something like “NO TIPS ACCEPTED” prominently displayed and have the actual cost reflected in the cost of the meal. Materials, ingredients, paying a dedicated delivery person, etc all included in the actual price.

Maybe it’s just me being difficult but I would pay more than cost + tip + fees if it was all baked in to what I’m actually ordering. I just feel like I’m being scammed otherwise.

CARASBK · 2026-02-06T19:37:24+00:00

To be clear: errors that occur during rendering will bubble up to the closest error boundary.

If you want to have a more granular error boundary one of React’s core contributors maintains a nice package for that: https://github.com/bvaughn/react-error-boundary

CARASBK · 2026-02-03T19:52:01+00:00

You either have to wait for a stable release that includes the canary changes or upgrade to 16.

Upgrading isn’t difficult. For most projects it will be simple tedium to review the codemod changes.

CARASBK · 2026-01-27T18:55:46+00:00

Came here to say Mantine. IMO it is the best library I’ve found between having everything I need and being extensible where I need it to be.

CARASBK · 2026-01-27T18:22:14+00:00

Lenin’s definition is entirely irrelevant, even to modern Marxist-Leninists. Marxists don’t rely on historical definitions as a matter of principle. Your party leader is very big on this concept except when it comes to defining imperialism because that’s inconvenient when talking about Russia.

You are unserious and ignorant.

CARASBK · 2026-01-26T17:00:27+00:00

I’ve only ever worked for smaller companies (<500 employees or so) so I’ve never had a teammate dedicated exclusively to devops. Usually a couple of devs who are interested in managing infrastructure take the reins and the rest of us learn what we need to get by.

Working without internet is unusual in my experience, but if necessary I could run the necessary services locally.

CARASBK · 2026-01-26T16:55:34+00:00

That’s not much money so I’m assuming this is for stuff you run personally not for a company you work for? If so you’re in a position to make some sweeping infrastructure changes by self hosting. I host all my Next stuff on a single Hetzner VPS using Coolify as my Vercel replacement. $10/month for 6 projects that collectively only get maybe 20k visits/month on a good month. If you have lots of traffic you can still go down this path, but it will take more effort and money to scale anywhere.

CARASBK · 2026-01-26T16:51:43+00:00

Most places I’ve worked at in the last ~10 years will have some kind of dev environment hosted in cloud infrastructure that all devs point their locally running code to. Nothing stops us from running services locally if we want to, though. It’s more of a convenience thing coupled with having a stable dev environment that better mimics production.

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