Dane Knecht on future of software engineering
From Cloudflare CTO talks AI, Opensource and the Future | Standup #52 · · TheStandupPod
“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.”
On , Dane Knecht, Senior Vice President of Emerging Technology & Incubation at Cloudflare, spoke about future of software engineering during Cloudflare CTO talks AI, Opensource and the Future | Standup #52 on TheStandupPod.
About Dane Knecht
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.