This Week In React #270 : Next.js, React Router | Hermes, React Navigation, CSS Grid, Maestro | Node, Oxfmt

#react #reactnative

Hi everyone!

Hello everyone, Krzysztof and Kacper from Software Mansion here 👋

The React Foundation officially launched. Cloudflare rebuilt the whole Next.js in a week using AI. In the meantime, the real Next.js is adding version-matched docs so agents always have context on new and recently updated APIs.

On the React Native side, Hermes is moving beyond mobile: Hermes-node brings the engine to Node.js as a potential V8 swap. CSS Grid is also coming to React Native, and TanStack Router has an early PoC running natively.

Let's dive in!

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How we rebuilt Next.js with AI in one week

A single Cloudflare engineer rebuilt the Next.js API surface (App Router, RSC, Server Actions, middleware) on Vite in one week using AI for $1,100. Using Oxc/Rolldown, it builds 4.4x and produces 57% smaller bundles. Using the Vite Environment API, it overcomes OpenNext limits, making it compatible with edge runtimes such as Cloudflare Workers.

What started as a bold experiment became vinext. It passes 2000+ tests and has 94% test coverage of the Next.js 16 API surface. The cio.gov website already runs it in production. It also introduces new concepts such as “Traffic-aware Pre-Rendering”.

This AI-driven port was only possible because Next.js has a well-documented API surface and a comprehensive test suite. A reminder of something TDD practitioners have known for years, but seems more important than ever today: the real value lies in the specification, the test suite, and the API design. Even Guillermo Rauch now believes that most software will start as markdown spec files implemented by coding agents. In Tests Are The New Moat, the author argues that we may see more open-source projects with private test suites: that’s what SQLite is already doing.

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📣 The React Foundation has officially launched, hosted by the Linux Foundation - React, React Native, and supporting projects like JSX are no longer owned by Meta. Huawei joined the previously announced founding members.
📖 Next.js - AI Agents Guide - Upcoming Next.js releases will include version-matched docs to provide agents with up-to-date context, improving Next.js Evals success rate by ~20%.
📜 Aurora Scharff - Building Design Components with Action Props using Async React - Pattern for encapsulating optimistic updates, pending indicators, and rollback inside reusable components
📜 TkDodo - Creating Query Abstractions - Using queryOptions is an alternative to hooks for achieving a reusable data object. This approach allows you to use the object even outside of React components.
📜 Kent C. Dodds - Migrating Remix v2 to React Router v7 with Cursor - Showcases how he used Composer for large-scale dependency upgrades completed in a day.
📜 React Router Loaders and Actions as Integration Points - Testing routing with business logic in isolation is tough due to complex mocking. The author suggests that mixing unit and e2e tests can solve that.
📜 Create a Multi-Directory Route Organization in React Router - By using flatRoutes, you can maintain a scalable structure with better logic separation in a growing React Router application.
📜 Removing Next.js Taught Me Why Frameworks Are Still Essential Even for AI - The author tried building with HTML and vanilla JS, then concludes that frameworks are necessary precisely because we are in the era of agents, giving them useful constraints. Note that Elon Musk predicts something different: AI will bypass coding and directly create binaries (tweet).
📜 React’s useTransition: The hook you’re probably using wrong
📜 Creating a 3D Product Grid with React Three Fiber
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📦 Ink 6.8 - renderToString(), React DevTools v7, performance caching
📦 Split Pane 3.2 - pointerType in ResizeEvent
📦 Vercel Chat SDK - Lets you build chatbots, supports JSX syntax
🎥 Josef Bender - Build a blog with type-safe Markdown and TanStack Start
🎥 Fireship - TanStack Start in 100 Seconds
🎥 Hamed Bahram - Master nuqs in 1 hour - URL state in NextJs with François Best

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Hermes-node

Tzvetan Mikov from the Hermes team announced Hermes-node, a CLI version of Hermes compatible with the Node.js API. Since Hermes-node acts as a compatibility layer, it can use original Node.js module implementations without needing to rewrite them - most work out of the box. You can think of this as simply swapping the V8 engine for Hermes. If combined with compiling Hermes to binary code, this feature could bring significant benefits to the entire Node.js ecosystem.