From Gatsby to Next.js: An AI-powered migration
3 min.
I finally decided to migrate this blog from Gatsby to Next.js. The main reason? Gatsby seems to have been abandoned, while Next.js continues to thrive and evolve.
The Gatsby situation
I've been following a GitHub issue titled "Is Gatsby discontinued? Please upvote for clarification." (here) for over a year now. I check it occasionally to see if there's any official response and, honestly, to laugh at the darkly humorous new comments that keep piling up.
One user commented: "The only active part of gatsby is the fucking bot."
Another lamented: "Coding with Gatsby used to be such a breeze :( Nevertheless, it's an awesome framework, it deserves some love, and I hope it overcomes this challenging period."
The issue has been open since November 2023, with hundreds of upvotes and still no official response from the Gatsby team. That silence speaks volumes.
Migration with AI
I expected the migration to take days of manual work, hunting down Gatsby-specific code and rewriting it for Next.js. But then I tried asking Claude 3.7 Sonnet to do it for me, using the Cursor editor.
The way Cursor provides an editing context for Sonnet (similar to Claude Code) made a huge difference. The AI could see my entire codebase, understand its structure, and make precise edits directly in the files.
To my surprise, it took just minutes, not days! The AI:
- Analyzed my Gatsby codebase
- Generated equivalent Next.js components and pages
- Converted Gatsby-specific APIs to Next.js equivalents
- Preserved all my existing content and styling
There were a few small image-loading issues I had to fix manually, but it was 99% perfect on the first try.
Are frameworks becoming irrelevant?
This experience got me thinking about something interesting. If AI can convert code between frameworks so easily, does the choice of framework even matter anymore?
What's the point of frameworks if you can switch from one to another in minutes? What's the point of specific languages if the barrier to convert between them is disappearing?
We're not quite there yet, but I can't help wondering how far away we are from a world where developers focus purely on concepts and user experiences, while AI handles the implementation details and technical choices.
For now, I'm happy with Next.js. It's well-maintained, has great performance, and feels more future-proof than Gatsby. But who knows what I'll be using next year - and how easy that migration will be with AI assistance.