It's interesting how many of the low-effort vibecoded projects I see posted on reddit are on vercel. It's basically the default.

It's a good point, but I don't think the problem here is Claude. It's how you use it. We need to be guiding developers to not let Claude make decisions for them. It can help guide decisions, but ultimately one must perform the critical thinking to make sure it is the right choice. This is no different than working with any other teammate for that matter.

It's so trivial to seed. LLMs are basically the idiots that have fallen for all the SEO slop on Google. Did some travel planning earlier and it was telling me all about extra insurances I need and why my normal insurance doesn't cover X or Y (it does of course).

That's the irony of Mythos. It doesn't need to exist. LLM vibe slop has already eroded the security of your average site.

"Nobody ever got fired for putting their band page on MySpace."

They put a massive amount of VC cash into convincing people that Next.js was "the modern way" to create a website. Then they got lucky with the timing of LLMs becoming popular while they were the hot thing, leading LLMs to default to it when creating new websites. To picture that amount of VC cash - they're at Series F, and a huge chunk of that went towards marketing.

Both have been changing as people realize it's rarely the right tool for the job, and as LLMs also become more intelligent and better at suggesting other, better options depending on what is asked for (especially Claude Opus).

You use a free template that's done in Next.js and uses its Image component, so you need a server.

Everything runs fine locally until you try to deploy it, and bam you need 4g ram machine to run the thing.

So you host it on Vercel for free cause it's easy!

Then you want to check for more than 30 seconds of analytics, and it's pay time.

For many people Vercel is Easy (not simple)

Knowing how to operate a basic server is perceived as hard and dangerous by many, especially the generation that didn’t have a chance to play with Linux for fun when growing up

Very nice developer experience. A lot of batteries included, like CDN, incremental page regeneration, image pipeline or observability. Not having to maintain a server.

I’m still planning to move elsewhere though, the vendor lock-in is not worth it and I’d like to keep our infra in the EU.

For a lot of folks, I think its ease of deployment when using Next.js. I switched to astro, also doing a lot of cloudflare at the moment. Before that, I was doing OpenNext with sst.dev on AWS but it started feeling annoying.

it's free for newbies and everyone, ofc it's a trap but freemium model gets people. aws can cost easily few thousands with 2-3 mistakes and clicks. vercel makes you start free then if you grow they bill you 10x-100x aws

I suppose their market is one click deployments. Maybe for non technical people or people not willing to deal with infra.

Can one host a Next js app on cloudflare?

Develop experience. Ephemeral deploys. Decent observability. Decent CI options. Generous free tier.

I started using it a few years ago when I moved to my current company, and have to say I've learned to like it quite a bit. Moving to Cloudflare is an option, but currently it just works so we can't be bothered. Costs are not nothing, but basically no issues with it until now, and it's not so expensive that it raises eyebrows with the biggest being that we have 3 seats. The setup is quick and again it just works. We are a very small team, and the fact we don't have to deal with it on a daily/weekly basis is valuable. Obviously this current situation is a problem, but I am not sure which platform is free of issues like these. People act like it can't happen to me, until it does.

It takes a while to realize you're being gaslit.

0.82% of homes are burglarized every year.

Meaning since 2015, you’ve got an 8.2% chance of having someone walk out with that box. Hopefully there’s nothing precious on it.