Every frontend developer has lived this ticket: "Here's our marketing site, rebuild it in React." Or the freelance version: "Can you move our Webflow site to Next.js so we stop paying the subscription?"
You open DevTools. You start copying styles. You eyeball paddings. You recreate the DOM by hand, section by section, and three days later you have something that's almost like the original, except the hero spacing is slightly off and nobody can tell you why.
I did this enough times that I built a tool to kill the boring 80% of it: paste a URL, get an editable Next.js + Tailwind project. This post is about why that conversion is genuinely hard, the problems that make "just scrape the HTML" a naive answer, and the architecture that the job forces on you.
The problem isn't getting the HTML. It's everything after.
If the job were "fetch the markup," curl would solve it. The hard part is that a modern website is not its HTML. It's:
