Next.js: Smart Bundling Gets Smarter
The Next.js team shipped two important improvements today - a major enhancement to segment bundling that ensures inlining hints always work correctly across different rendering scenarios, and cleaner documentation for error handling. Andrew Clark led the bundling work while Jiwon Choi polished up the error handling docs.
Duration: PT4M7S
Episode overview
This episode is a short developer briefing from Next.js.
It explains recent repository work in plain language.
- Show: Next.js
- Published: 2026-03-23T10:07:15Z
- Audio duration: PT4M7S
Transcript excerpt
This excerpt keeps the crawler page concise. Listen to the episode or use the RSS feed for the full update.
Hey there, fellow developers! Welcome back to another episode of the Next.js podcast. I'm your host, and wow, do we have some exciting updates to dive into today. Grab your favorite beverage because we're talking about some really thoughtful engineering that's going to make your apps faster and more reliable.
Let's jump right into the big story of the day - Andrew Clark just merged a fantastic pull request that's all about making segment bundling smarter. Now, if you're not familiar with segment bundling, think of it as Next.js being really clever about which parts of your app to load together. It's like having a smart…
Here's where it gets interesting - the system uses something called "inlining hints" that are computed at build time by measuring gzip sizes. These hints get saved to a file called prefetch-hints.json, and they tell the client which segments should be bundled together for optimal performance. Pretty neat, right?
But Andrew discovered there were some scenarios where these hints might not be available when the app needs them, and that could put the client in a bad state. Nobody wants that! So this pull request addresses three specific scenarios with some really…
First…
Fo…
Nearby episodes from Next.js
- Turbopack Gets Smarter & Tests Get More Reliable
- The Performance Optimization Marathon
- Enterprise-Ready Security & Better Developer Experience
- Future-Proofing and Performance Optimizations
- Turbopack Performance Revolution
- Turbopack Takes Center Stage & Performance Wins
- Turbopack Gets Major Webpack Compatibility Boost
- Build Performance Revolution