Next.js 15.3: A Huge Change for Vercel

I need to be real with y'all. It's been pretty hard to defend Nex.js over the last 2 years. There's a lot I love about it, but there have been a lot of things that rightfully people have been upset about. There's even a few that I'm personally very burned about. Don't get me started on the Turbo Pack stuff. It's it's been a lot. That said, there's been a significant course correction over the last few months, and we're starting to see it really come out with the latest version of Next 15.3. There are a ton of useful changes both within the next 153 release itself and within the things going on around it. All of which are

worth talking about and better understanding. So whether or not you're an XJS dev, I think this will be useful just to better understand where the market is going and how Versel is course correcting. If you are an XJS dev, this is absolutely going to be an essential watch. But as you guys know, Verscell does not pay me anymore and hasn't for quite a while. So someone's got to cover the bills. So we'll be right back after the sponsor break and then we'll dive right in. Generally speaking, when I'm starting new projects, I have a good idea of roughly what I want when I'm doing it. And using a CLI to do it is probably not going to get me there very fast. Today's sponsor, Bolt.new, really

gets this. They're not some weird new startup doing AI generated apps. This is Stack Blitz, the company that made the only good editor in the browser and also invented the web container, which lets you run a full node environment in the browser. That's why Bolt is so great. They're the only one of these AI app platforms that runs all the code on your machine after you generate. So, it makes everything way faster and more reliable in your development environment. And it's a real development environment. If you don't believe me, I'll just show you. Build a fan site for corgi lovers

using Nex.js. As you can see, it's already generating real code in a real editor as well as a real terminal that I can run real node commands in, which is just crazy. And once it's all done, if I'm happy with the results, it's literally one click to deploy. I remember when I first got the demo of this from Eric, who's the CEO and a good friend. He came over just because he wanted to chat and he showed this to me and I I just didn't get how it could possibly be working. And it makes a lot of sense that a few months later they're

killing it and everyone's starting their sites using Bolt. It's really good. Wait, what? Okay, the sites are normally pretty good, but this is like annoyingly so. What? It even found good images of corgis. There's this one that's not a corgi, but that is not an issue considering how good this came out. And it's real Nex.js code. This is an actual Nex.js app router codebase. You take a look at the page, see all the things here, and it's even using Shad CNN. So, if you like the

Shad CN UI stuff, here you go. It's all built in. I I still can't believe the other options don't have this. There's a hide chat button so you can just live in the code because a lot of us are actual engineers that want to actually look at and use the code from the project. That's also why they have an export button where you can oneclick open it in stack blitz or just download the code as a zip because it all exists in your browser cuz it's a real instance. More and more it feels like Bolt's the only one of these AI app builders that understands what we need as developers. And I firmly believe that just because I

know the team so well and these are some of the smartest and most hardworking open source people I know in the entire web world. So if you want a great way to start your next project, check out bolt.new today at soy dev.ink/bolt. So what makes NEX53 so special? First and foremost, it is the build side of things because Turboac finally now supports builds in alpha. That means you probably shouldn't be using this for production just yet, but they've been using it for production already at Versell, which is really, really cool to see. They share

some numbers underneath here. First off though, over half of dev sessions on Next 15 are already using TurboAC, so they've had support in dev for a while. All the projects I work in use Turboac. It is a massive difference. You go from waiting minutes for the dev environment to spin up to seconds and updates with the hot reloading literally happen pretty much instantaneously, like under 100 milliseconds most of the time. It's so much better and I couldn't work on a project the size of T3 chat without Turboac. It would just be miserable. The alternative would be VIT in the VT