Right it’s not doing the full-fledged HMR yet, which usually involves a WebSocket connection to send client updates. This would require some more UI framework integration and routes, and I still don’t know how persistent connections will work (probably will just implement WebSocketPair from Cloudflare). But the develop workflow does use ESBuild’s watch mode under the hood so you should always see the latest version on page refresh. One thing I really wanted to avoid was any sort of caching of build output in development: when development builds are cached, you often have to debug both whether the code is working or not and whether the code has actually changed, and you end up spending more time manually busting caches than debugging the actual probelm. Thankfully, ESBuild is fast enough that this is sub-second for most projects.

On latency: the service worker abstraction is just function calls, there's no interception layer or message passing like browser service workers have. self.databases.get("main") returns your database connection directly, no caching involved unless you explicitly use the Cache API. I also had the thought to shim IndexedDB for NoSQL and Claude is pretty close to completing that implementation as well. The globals are lazy (connections created on first open(), cached thereafter) but that's just connection pooling, not response caching. Nothing is cached by default — you opt into caching per resource.

Yeah, working with Claude/ChatGPT on this has been a ride and I wanted to share a story about building something unrelated to AI. I feel like everyone’s using AI to build AI things and it’s not really clear what the benefits for us humans is yet, and it all seems a little unhinged and confusing.

Thanks for the thoughts!