I’m working on an MVP web app with my friend. I’m pretty experienced with React, but with older versions of it. I haven’t yet had the chance to experiment with Next.js, and it’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long time. This seemed like a great opportunity to do it!
So I jumped right it, did the absolute minimum Next.js setup, and then went right into business logic.
Oops. Wrong choice.
Pretty quickly I started getting bogged down in errors that seemed quite magical. But they were very nicely formatted, lots of links to docs and such! I was trying to push to see how much I could get done without doing quite a bit of learning. So I tried to vibe code my way out of it.
Didn’t really work. Sometimes the vibe coding would get something sort-of decent. After a bunch of tries. And without me really understanding what choices Next had made and constraints / way of doing things it requires.
I was trying to get stuff done quickly without really understanding what was going on under the hood (at least at some level), or why.
That led to frustration. A lot of frustration. Especially around why stuff wasn’t working. Or how to approach fixing it.
So I backed up.
I decided to go through Next’s tutorial. Much better choice. I’m about a day in, 75% done, and things make way more sense.
Next is solving for a lot of problems that a tiny little MVP might (read, probably) won’t have initially. So in order to do that, they’ve made a bunch of choices for you. And that then requires you to do things a certain way, certain conventions, etc…
But (my understanding is) the upside is that SO MUCH is done-for-you. I’m cautiously optimistic to see if using Next, and especially staying on the “golden path” of done-for-you we-have-solutions approaches can speed up making this MVP.
We’ll see!