Gatsby

Raised as a usability problem by 17 people on Hacker News over 8 years (2016–2023), in 10 threads.

People raised many different problems with Gatsby, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 18 complaints

Developer cannot start an old project because the install fails on new machines2023-12-18
Plugin system is confusing and poorly documented, hard to customize plugins2020-12-16
Found it very confusing as someone not familiar with React2020-10-20
Minor configuration errors only show up weeks later after indexing, with long compilation times2020-10-13
Hot reload doesn't refresh content, so editors can't preview changes smoothly2020-10-04
Production build takes about 30 seconds and runs out of heap memory2020-10-03
GraphQL adds complexity overkill and reloading page data on the fly is lost2020-10-03
Debugging GraphQL queries lacks intellisense; config files are monstrous and hard to work with2020-10-03
Build times are very slow and developers spend excessive time fiddling with it2020-10-03
Forced GraphQL even for simple things like displaying an image, with bloated nested fields2020-05-28
Builds crash from memory exhaustion and a single bad URL, forcing full rebuilds2020-05-27
Displaying a Markdown file needs a plugin and a GraphQL query first2020-05-27
Felt overengineered for a simple static site; GraphQL layer hinders rather than helps2020-05-27
Visitors see stale old content and must refresh; sometimes the site shows blank pages2020-05-27
Gatsby internals are complex, so custom work means debugging abstractions and edge cases2020-04-23
Every publish requires a full rebuild taking about eight minutes, delaying content changes2019-09-27
Implementing tree navigation requires juggling nodes, GraphQL, webpack, and fragments, too much ceremony2018-10-11
Blog posts built with Gatsby load slowly for readers, unlike other static sites2016-07-21