From HTML to Next.js: The Painful (and Honest) Transition of a FUTO Undergrad

I started my frontend journey like many developers: writing index.html, linking style.css, and maybe throwing in a script.js if I was feeling fancy. It was simple. It was predictable. It was home. Then I decided to learn Next.js. The Wake-Up Call I'm an undergraduate at FUTO, and I'm building an offline AI companion called Pantero. The waitlist is growing (187+ now), the offline AI core is stable, and the frontend is complete. But let me tell you - getting there involved a lot of pain.