Improving navigation experience in v0 with Next.js 16.4

Previously, we shared how a coding agent used the instant() Playwright test helper to make navigations instant in v0 , Vercel's AI app builder. That work focused on the core /chat experience.

In other parts of v0, users saw loading skeletons when they returned to pages they had already opened. Useful content was not always ready before the first click, either. We wanted those pages to behave more like a single-page app, with content prefetched on the way in and still available on the way back.

Next.js 16.3 introduced Partial Prefetching. Next.js 16.4 added more control over when cached content loads, along with the new next-partial-prefetching-optimizer Skill for optimizing what gets prefetched.