Cross-posted from my blog. The original, with any updates, lives on fabwaseem.com .

Repo: github.com/fabwaseem/forgekit , MIT licensed. Clone it, run one setup script, and you have a working AI chat app on your own machine.

A Next.js AI starter kit is a ready-to-run Next.js project that already wires up the hard parts of an AI app: streaming chat, model providers, auth, a database, retrieval over your own documents and a deploy path. Forgekit is my open-source Next.js AI starter kit. It is built on Next.js 16, the AI SDK, Better Auth, Drizzle and PostgreSQL with pgvector, and it runs on Docker, Coolify or Vercel.

This post explains what Forgekit includes, how it is put together, how it compares with other options, and how to run, extend and deploy it. Every number here comes from building and running the repo myself.

What is a Next.js AI starter kit?

A Next.js AI starter kit is a template repository that gives you a working AI application on day one instead of a blank create-next-app .…