Senior Vice President of Emerging Technology & Incubation, Cloudflare
Search every verified Dane Knecht interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Dane Knecht, Cloudflare's Senior Vice President of Emerging Technology & Incubation, appeared on two episodes of "The Standup" in April 2026 to discuss the company's "Vinext" (or "V-Next") project, an open-source experiment that aims to bring the Next.js API surface to Cloudflare's runtime. Knecht stated that the project originated from a half-finished intern prototype and is now maintained using AI bots for triaging, reviewing pull requests, and conducting security reviews. He described the effort as an experiment in making open source sustainable in the AI era, noting that many maintainers struggle with the volume of contributions. Knecht said the project was driven by customer demand, with one of the biggest requests over five years being easier deployment of Next.js on Cloudflare. He commented that forks in open source are healthy, citing the io.js fork of Node as an example that brought the community back together. Knecht also stated that while humans are not going away in software development, their role will change, and he predicted there will be more engineers, not fewer. He emphasized that AI should be treated like another engineer and that it has helped clean up tech debt by enforcing better documentation and code structure.
“The goal is pretty much everything we do. We do it for customers. For almost 5 years now it's been one of the biggest requests is how do you make Next easier to deploy on Cloudflare. We recognize we have a slightly different architecture. We have region earth, deploy once goes everywhere. We have that applies different...”
“It's like part of why we can keep doing this is because of AI, too. It's why we could do it and then it's why we could keep doing it. I mean, in some ways the fact that we're also doing this as open source, it's a kind of a bigger experiment on how you make open source work in the AI world.”
“I definitely if there's anything I've learned from this, it's that humans, in my opinion, aren't going anywhere in software development. But our role is going to change. I mean, I still think there's going to be over the long term more engineers not less.”
“Everything we do, we do it for customers. For almost 5 years now, one of the biggest requests has been how do you make Next.js easier to deploy on Cloudflare? We recognize we have a slightly different architecture: deploy once, goes everywhere, which applies different constraints to how you build things on Cloudflare.”
Dane Knecht, Steve Faulkner, and Dillon Mulroy walk through how the project went from a half-finished intern prototype to a ...
Ship with confidence. Try Sentry: https://trm.sh/sentry Full episode on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5JF0... This week on The Standup, we sit down with the team behind Cloudflare’s “Vinext” experiment an attempt to bring the Next.js API surface onto a completely different runtime. What starts as a simple “why does this exist?” quickly turns into a deep dive on AI-driven development, open source in the age of agents, and what happens when an intern is told to “just build Next.js” . Dane Knecht, Steve Faulkner, and Dillon Mulroy walk through how the project went from a half-finis…
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