Dev Environment & Infra

Ask Claude Code or ChatGPT to build a web app and it almost always says "let's use Next.js." But what is Next.js, exactly? Is plain React not enough? This article gives you a complete breakdown — what Next.js is, why AI defaults to recommending it, how it differs from React, what SSR/SSG/ISR mean, App Router vs Pages Router, its relationship with Vercel, and how it compares to alternatives like Nuxt, Remix, and Astro — all updated for Next.js 16.2 (March 2026).

Claude Opus 4.7 shipped, and migrating from 4.6 comes with several breaking changes: extended thinking (enabled) is gone, temperature/top_p/top_k are gone, the new tokenizer produces up to 1.35x more tokens, thinking content is hidden by default, and prefill is gone. This article walks through every breaking change with Python and TypeScript Before/After snippets, behavioral changes, recommended settings, and a line-by-line migration checklist.

When you have AI write code for you, it keeps suggesting "just deploy to Vercel." But what is Vercel? How is it different from shared hosting or AWS? This article compares PaaS (Vercel and friends) against shared hosting, VPS, and cloud (IaaS) across cost, flexibility, and operational overhead. We also walk through the major services --- Vercel, Netlify, Render, Railway --- and show you which one fits your use case.

When you ask Claude Code or ChatGPT about setting up a development environment, there's a good chance they'll suggest Docker. But what exactly is Docker? Do you really need it? This article explains why AI recommends Docker, provides a decision flowchart to determine if you need it right now, covers the essential concepts, and shows you alternatives so you can start coding without Docker.