bundieWe moved Railway's frontend off Next.js. Builds went from 10+ mins to under two
https://blog.railway.com/p/moving-railways-frontend-off-nextjs
It’s absolutely mind boggling to me that we have gotten to a point that building a web frontend takes longer than compiling the Linux kernel..
As a non-frontend developer mainly observing and touching something here and there, a lot of the things that frontend developers do seem vastly over-engineered.
I'm not insanely deep into frontend, I mostly just pick up React and call it a day, but it seems like this is also over-engineered?
I've seen vanilla JS before, and I just know I wouldn't want to do the housekeeping that comes with it. People claim it's less work because it' simpler, but I fully expect myself to rewrite the thing at least twice, only to give up because I have no actual mental model anymore of how it works.
Isn't the main problem that the building blocks the modern web is based on are not a good fit for what we do with it?
CSS is a total mess. HTML is a mess. JS is okay, but is not a high quality language.
We would save so much time and money if we would have a modern base to build on. Sadly this will probably never happen, because company interests will try to corrupt the process and therefore destroy it.
We went through a very similar migration. Had a Next.js landing page and a separate TanStack Router SPA - consolidated both into a single Vite + TanStack Start app. Same experience with build times and the architecture mismatch: our app is heavily client-side with real-time state, and fighting Next.js's server-first assumptions wasn't worth it. TanStack Router's type-safe routing and file-based route generation have been great.
I have a Nextjs heavy app which takes around 7 minutes currently. But I've been thinking of moving away from next for a long time now. TanStack seems to be a good fit. This gives me a bit more confidence in just doing it.
I've been pretty happy with TanStack start for a medium-sized project. I would not know how its build time would compare to Next, but our similarly sized Remix (sorry, React router v7) app takes longer to build.
TanStack just has a nicer mental model overall and works great with TanStack query for cache I validation and stuff like that.
Remix was promising but there was so much ceremony in registering API routes and stuff. Tanstack just lets you define server functions arbitrarily with no ceremony.
Might be worth a spike and some tokens to ask Claude Code to migrate and test the build time and ergonomics.
Is server-rendered HTML that bad for 2026 web or is everyone building complex apps?
Many of my customers insists on using Next.js or similar but when I browse their website I don't get the point. They are downloading and executing megabytes of JS while in-page interactions tends to be limited to few basic stuff. Never seen one of their project requiring offline mode. Maybe that's being able to easily replace a [FRAMEWORK] dev with another.