Next.js 16.2 is Here (And It's Stupid Fast)

Next.js 16.2 delivers major performance improvements including 400% faster dev server startup, 25-60% faster HTML rendering via a React-level change to server component payload deserialization (replacing JSON.parse reviver callbacks with pure JavaScript recursive walks), 2-20x faster image response, and a new default error page. The release also introduces AI-focused features: an agents.md file included by default in new projects for AI coding agent context, server function logging in the terminal, a dev server lock file to prevent port conflicts, and experimental agent dev tools that expose browser-level data (screenshots, network requests, component trees) to AI agents via shell commands.