March 2025 Summaries

Netlify, a platform for building and deploying websites, is celebrating its 10-year anniversary. Over the past decade, Netlify has evolved with the web development community, introducing features such as Git-based deployments, Deploy Previews, Serverless Functions, and a suite of composable tools to make it easier for developers to build and deploy websites. The platform has enabled millions of developers, teams, and businesses to create great experiences, including critical public health tools like the Covid Tracking Project. Netlify's success is a testament to the community's ideas, feedback, and creativity, which have shaped everything they've accomplished. As the web continues to evolve, Netlify is committed to empowering the community with AI-powered development tools called Agent Experience (AX), aiming to make the web faster, more scalable, and easier to build while maintaining human control over workflows.

Netlify has emerged as the default platform for deploying AI-generated code at scale, with over 1 million web applications built with Bolt.new and deployed on Netlify in just five months. This milestone signals that AI-assisted development is accelerating rapidly, and Netlify's API-first architecture, instant deployment pipeline, security features, and scalability make it uniquely suited to handle the demands of AI-generated code. The platform's design accommodates both human developers and AI agents, enabling seamless collaboration and iteration cycles, and its infrastructure can handle traffic spikes and large-scale deployments without requiring complex DevOps expertise. With 10,000 sites deployed daily from AI codegen platforms, Netlify is poised to play a significant role in the future of web development.

Next.js is an open-source web development framework created and governed by Vercel, which offers managed hosting of Next.js as a service. However, maintaining this level of support for Next.js comes at a cost and presents unique engineering challenges, particularly with its closed nature of maintenance. The framework's lack of adapter support, no production-grade documentation for serverless deployments, undocumented behaviors, lack of roadmap visibility, and release predictability are significant challenges that need to be addressed to ensure compatibility and ease of use across different platforms. Despite these challenges, Netlify is committed to collaborating with the community, Vercel, and the Next.js team to provide a better experience for developers and their sites' visitors, and has already taken concrete steps to address some of these issues.

AI is becoming increasingly interactive with web platforms, yet few are designed to effectively support this interaction. Agent Experience (AX) aims to optimize the experience of AI agents using digital services, ensuring they can autonomously navigate and complete tasks within modern web ecosystems. The open source contributors have created Principles of AX that provide a framework for applying these practices, focusing on human centricity, agent accessibility, and contextual alignment. For developers, this means rethinking how to build applications that incorporate AI agents as central participants. Businesses that design platforms with agents in mind will enable better automation, improve efficiency, and enhance customer experiences, while those who don't risk falling behind in an AI-driven world. AX will define how businesses adapt to the evolving generation of consumption and interaction, making it essential for developers and businesses to review the Principles of AX and assess their current agent experience.

The TanStack project is an open-source, full-stack React framework that's gaining momentum in the developer community. It offers a client-first approach with flexible architecture, function-based routing with type safety, and seamless integration with TanStack Query for efficient data management. TanStack Start, a newer version of the framework, provides a fresh way forward with improved developer experience, flexible server functions, and advanced caching capabilities. The project has gained significant traction, with over 97,000 GitHub stars across its toolkit, and is being supported by Netlify as its official deployment partner and sponsor. This partnership aims to further fund the development of TanStack Start and collaborate closely with the community to create an even better experience for developers on Netlify.

The evolution of the modern web is a topic of discussion between Martin Casado, an a16z partner, and Mathias Biilmann, CEO of Netlify. They explore areas such as Netlify's pioneering work in modern web development, AI acceleration as an enabler for developers, the drop in cost but rise in quality expectations, and Agent Experience as a tectonic shift that requires industry attention. The conversation highlights the importance of open source collaboration to shape this future where AI plays a significant role in unlocking potential for developers, websites, and businesses.