Many design decisions around server actions seem stupid

1. Forced sequential and disabled parallel execution. Why?

It is huge constraint. If I need something to be sequentially executed, I would just do await await await anyway.

Sometimes, on frontend, I need to call multiple longer tasks in parallel (like image generation) or fetch many things at once.

I understand that "data fetching" is intended to be done inside server components, but many times I need to fetch data dynamically during some client side interaction, inside client components.

In mentioned cases, server actions suck.

2. Version skew and inability to provide custom function id. Why?

On every redeploy server actions get new id, which creates errors for users who opened website before that (and loaded old ids).

This is huge pain in the a**.

Why are we not able to just provide our id, and change it when we feel it is needed?

3. All checks (like rate limit and auth) can be done ONLY after full body was parsed and loaded into RAM. Why?

I want to load body only if request passes rate limit and auth check. It does not make sense to do it before and waste hosting resources (RAM, CPU...).

Further more, loading whole body into RAM before mentioned checks opens big opportunity for denial of service attacks and similar.

4. Forcing POST requests and mutations as only intended use. Why?

Why can't we specify which type of request certain server action will be?

5. Relying on "use server" directive at top of the file instead of having special function for creating server actions. Why?

Maybe just personal preference, but I like more how it is done inside TanStack start. Much more DX friendly.

So, all mentioned problems with NextJS server actions are solved in TanStack start:

server function creation and usage: link
customizable ids persisted during deployments (not ideal, but still better): link

Why NextJS seems so stupid about all this?

Why NextJS does not have some good general purpose remote procedure call (RPC) system, like TanStack start?

Yeah, there is tRPC etc, but it has lots of boilerplate and it's not native framework thing.

u/Zogid — 1 day ago

▲ 0 r/nextjs+1 crossposts

Security advice: uninstall as many packages as you can. Instead, copy from their source code or tell AI to recreate functionality.

Everybody knows how much packages get poisoned by evil guys, and malware ends up on your machine by installing/updating them.

It's not just some obscure niche packages, but also established ones with millions of weekly downloads.

Also, many people forget that packages install huge number of other packages as dependencies, which you don't see in package.json.

I just realized that many packages can be very quickly replaced by

Inspecting it's source code and copying things you need
Telling AI to implement it
Combination of both

This greatly reduces risk of having infected machine and saves lots of disk space.

For instance, I used few functions from cuid2 and lodash.

I opened source code, and realized that these functions are relatively simple so I just copied them, or told AI to rewrite them a little bit. And deinstalled packages of course.

It took me like 5 minutes to do it, and I got rid of many packages (main + invisible dependent ones).

Also, installed lodash is actually huge, but I used only like 0.001% from it lol, so there was huge pile of junk eating disk space.

reddit.com

u/Zogid — 23 days ago

▲ 1 r/Stutter

What do you think about Forbrain stuttering device?

I am talking about this: https://www.forbrain.com/stuttering/

They have two models, one specifically designed for stuttering.

It seems very promising. I remember that one of my speech therapist mentioned this once.

Have you used it? What is your experience on it? Is it just marketing or it really works?

u/Zogid — 1 month ago