Welcome to Syntax. Today we have Steve Faulkner on, and he is the creator of V-Nex. If you didn't hear about it,

basically Cloudflare took NextJS, and they created what is lovingly called a slop fork,

which is they ported the entire NextJS framework to Vite. And then they posted it and it was this big thing. And

we're not here too much to talk about like the drama of all of this and whatnot and

whether NextJS is hard to run on Cloudflare and whatnot. But I think we're more interested

here of like, how did you do this? You know? Like, like, how was this created? What's your

process for tackling something that is not like, oh, cool, you made like a little app or you

can like drag and drop stuff around or you made a photo booth app, but like you literally took like

an existing, I'm not going to say spec, but like like test suite and replicated most of the software behind it. So super interesting one. I'm super happy to have them on. Welcome, Steve. Thanks so much for coming on. Yeah, happy to be here. Like I said, I'm excited to tell the world more about this. I think it's a cool story. It's a cool story about AI and just the world we're living in right now and how rapidly it's changing. I think this is going to be a wild year, maybe wild five or ten years for software. Yeah. Yeah, buckle up. So give us a quick rundown of who you are and what you do. My name is Steve Faulkner. I am the director of engineering here for workers. So pretty much own kind of the whole workers org at Cloudflare. It includes other things like our agents product, containers, some of the stuff around Wrangler, CLI. So I didn't list all the teams. Apologies to who I missed, but it's roughly like 80 people. I've been here for a couple years. And yeah, that's my role. I'm not writing code every day. That's not what I do.

I've seen a lot of people have said a lot of stuff about what I did and about the blog.

And I think the only real correction that I want to make is a lot of people have been calling me a 100x engineer or something like that.

I would use a title 100X engineering manager is how I would.

I think that would be the correct.

Yeah, given the state of AI, isn't that like kind of where we're landing though? Those are the people with the the superpowers

are the 100X engineer manager. And we'll jump right into that. Like I think AI is an application

factor, right? If you know what you need to do, I think you can use AI to do it faster and better. But it works in both directions, right?

I mean, I've seen it negatively amplify things when you don't know what you need to do or

you have the wrong kind of direction, right? It just helps you go, but the human still needs to set the

direction. I was curious about the term slop fork that has been thrown around, given the nature

of AI writing it.

How does that term, like, hit you?

How do you feel about the term slop fork being used here?

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