Rspress 2.0: AI-Native Documentation, Faster Startup and a Redesigned Theme

"Rspress 2.0 introduces a redesigned default theme crafted by designer Zovn Wei, offering four tiers of customisation. Developers can adjust CSS variables for quick theming, target BEM class names for precise style overrides, use ESM re-exports to swap individual components, or eject components entirely for full control."

"One of the more forward-looking additions is the Static Site Generation to Markdown (SSG-MD) feature, a new rendering mode that generates Markdown files and llms.txt output from documentation sites. Rather than converting HTML back to Markdown, which often produces poor results, SSG-MD renders content through the React virtual DOM to produce high-quality Markdown suitable for AI agents."

"Build performance sees significant gains through two features enabled by default: lazy compilation and persistent caching. With lazy compilation, pages are only compiled when visited during development, reducing cold start times from seconds to as low as 50 milliseconds according to benchmarks shared by the Rspress team on GitHub."

Rspress 2.0, released January 30th 2026, represents a major update to the Rsbuild-based documentation generator following 144 releases and contributions from 125 developers. The release features a redesigned default theme with four customization tiers, from CSS variables to full component ejection, using BEM class names to remain framework-agnostic. A significant addition is SSG-MD, which generates high-quality Markdown and llms.txt files from documentation sites for AI agent compatibility. Build performance improvements include lazy compilation reducing cold starts to 50ms and persistent caching improving subsequent builds by 30-60%. Code highlighting infrastructure has also been updated.

Read at InfoQ