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In this video, I'm going to share with you my personal experience with using Next.js on my new platform Cosden Code and why I'm ultimately deciding to migrate away from it to Tanstack Start.

Next.js is not a bad framework, it was just not the right one for me and my application. I ended up spending too much time fighting with the framework instead of building and shipping features. And I had to deal with way more bugs than I normally would.

Migrating to Tanstack starts fixes all of that and is the best option for the success of Cosden Code. And in this video, I'll share with you everything that led up to that decision!

YouTube

A developer shares their decision to migrate an interactive coding platform away from Next.js to Tanstack Start. The main issues cited include extremely slow development mode performance (especially during video rendering), complexity of server components mental model, and frequent bugs with interactive features. The platform's highly interactive nature (code editors, live previews, chat) makes client-side rendering more suitable. Tanstack Start was chosen due to familiarity with Tanstack Query and Router, despite being in release candidate status.

Why I Stopped Using Next.js (And What I Switched To Instead)

clickbite - the whole video using nextjs

You can criticize Next.js all you want, but it’s hard to deny it’s still the closest thing to a complete, production-ready framework.
Switching to something simpler like TanStack Start is totally valid respect for exploring alternatives. I tried Start myself and while the beginner experience feels nice, once you get into real-world stuff like metadata, JSON-LD, or sitemaps, it quickly becomes a messy pile of boilerplate that’s much harder to organize than in Next.
There is no first-class metadata pipeline (In TSS). So you must:
<ul>
<li>Create a route</li>
<li>Manually control headers</li>
<li>Manually generate XML</li>
<li>Manually handle caching &amp; invalidation</li>
<li>Manually wire it into deployment behavior</li>
</ul>
This is not “flexibility”. This is infrastructure work leaking into application code.
Just look how to create a dynamic site-map :
<a href="https://tanstack.com/start/latest/docs/framework/react/guide/seo#dynamic-sitemap" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">Here</a>

I switched to Tanstack Start as well.

he should just use astro with island architecture, but hey - each to its own