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.
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.
Not to complexity, but to abstraction. The more something is abstracted away, the more fungible "developers" become, to the eventual tune of Claude Code.
No one cares that trying to debug a modern application is as hellish as its performance, the KPI that executives go for is employment budget.
You're still left alone with i18n, auth, and pretty much anything to do with the backend, all of which the Rails of this world have you covered.
On serious projects, it feels like even Claude Code could be more efficient with simple technologies, providing near-instant build and debug. With reduced abstractions and output looking like input, it can better understand how to fix things rather than trying to guess how to manipulate framework state or injecting hacks.
Looks like maybe things haven't changed much?
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.
Aside from some difficulty with mastering environment variables, I’ve been delighted with the change and will probably not look back.
We also recently cut our build times in half moving from Webpack to Turbopack on production builds after jumping to NextJS 16. We'd already been using Turbopack in development for a while which yielded massive DX improvements related to performance. Production build times will drop further once Turbopack production build caching is stable.
Webpack -> Turbopack is the smart initial migration. I'd bet Railway went straight from Webpack -> Vite not realising that their real gains sat with the build tooling, not NextJS vs Tanstack.