Published October 16: how v0, Next.js's own app-builder product, used 16.4's partial prefetching to make navigation instant, and how a coding agent carried the mechanical part of the migration.
The move that mattered
Partial prefetching downloads only the pieces of a route that change on navigation. The study reports the work was wiring explicit prefetch boundaries, not a route rewrite. The agent did imports, wrappers, configs; humans chose where the boundaries go and measured before merging.
- Boundaries were measured first; the delta was proven per navigation, not per hunch.
- Static pages gained exactly nothing from the change, which is the point.
- The agent's output was reviewed; the team kept only what survived the measurement.
Static pages gain nothing from prefetching. That is the quiet lesson, and it applies to plain HTML sites too.