Had a blast talking about Next.js 16 at React Summit yesterday! I built a Chatbot to show off some new features in Next that help you build apps with instant page navs and snappy interactions, even for apps with dynamic personalized data. Here's some highlights from the talk:

The Suspense Devtools are an incredible new tool that let you step through all potential loading states for any screen. In Next 16, the Initial Paint represents the prerendered static content. This content can be served instantly from a CDN, thanks to Cache Components.

If you pin a boundary, you can update your code and see the changes in real-time. Great for making sure certain elements (like the message box here) are part of the prerendered shell, or designing fallbacks and skeleton screens. You can even use it to preview ViewTransitions! 🤯

I also showed how to use Server Actions to return a stream directly from OpenAI's SDK. Server Actions participate in RSC's serialization format, and since OpenAI implements AsyncIterable, it just works. You can even use a generator to remove extra data! So freakin' cool.

The third demo showed how to make form actions update the UI instantly with useOptimistic. My favorite thing about this is that React will automatically discard the optimistic state once the action completes, guaranteeing that your app will never show stale client state.

Finally, I demoed a new API we have in the works: runtime prefetching. It's built on "use cache" and leverages Next's client-side cache to give you instant navigations to fully rendered pages. Even if those pages depend on dynamic user-specific data.

Runtime prefetching is a huge part of the story for dynamic apps, and I'm so glad it's coming soon. And all these features work beautifully in concert to speed up all Next apps, regardless of how much static or dynamic content they may have.

I'm working on a full tutorial for building dynamic apps with Next 16, so keep an eye out for that soon. And I'll be sure to share the talk from React Summit when it's up in a week or two! Was great to see so many of you there this year 🍻

Wow want

missing @_buildui so much

ty for sharing

We are all “tell me a long story”ing when testing chatbots aren’t we

Looks so intriguing

awesome work !

The real-time updates sound game-changing! Can't wait to see that tutorial on dynamic apps.

Is this part of the React DevTools? I see a Suspense tab there too!

Yessir, it's in experimental builds 👍

Any ETA on release? I can probably install a canary version right?