This is the AI apocalypse. Not AI nuking us, but nuking choice.

That was depressing as shit.

On the plus side, maybe this means the endless churn of JS libraries will finally slow down and as someone who isn’t a JS developer but occasionally needs to dip their toe into the ecosystem, I can actually get stuff done without having to worry about 6-month old tutorials being wrong and getting caught in endless upgrade hell.

The argument here is that React has permanently won because LLMs are so heavily trained on it and default to it in their answers.

I don't buy this. The big problem with React is that the compilation step is almost required - and that compilation step is a significant and growing piece of friction.

Compilation and bundling made a lot more sense before browsers got ES modules and HTTP/2. Today you can get a long way without a bundler... and in a world where LLMs are generating code that's actually a more productive way to work.

Telling any LLM "use Vanilla JS" is enough to break them out of the React cycle, and the resulting code works well and, crucially, doesn't require a round-trip through some node.js build mechanism just to start using it.

Call me a wild-eyed optimist, but I'm hoping LLMs can help us break free of React and go back to building things in a simpler way. The problems React solve are mostly around helping developers write less code and avoid having to implement their own annoying state-syncing routines. LLMs can spit out those routines in a split-second.

I don't buy it either. I've been building my own backend framework for the past 2.5 years, and even though it's a DSL over Python and there's no documentation online and barely one in my computer, Claude Code understands it with enough usage examples in my codebase.

In front-end as well—I've been able to go much farther for simple projects using alpine than more complex frameworks. For big products I use Elm, which isn't exactly the most common front-end choice but it provides a declarative programming style that forces the LLM to write more correct code faster.

In general, I think introspectible frameworks have a better case, and whether they're present in training data or not becomes more irrelevant as the introspectibility increases. Wiring the Elm compiler to a post-write hook means I basically have not written front-end code in 4 or 5 months. Using web standards and micro frameworks with no build step means the LLM can inspect the behaviour using the chrome dev tools MCP and check its work much more effectively than having to deal with the React loop. The ecosystem is so fragmented there, I'm not sure about the "quality because of quantity of training data" argument.

I feel like there could be a loophole here for the new-framework-author. Stick to using JSX for the view; JSX is just syntax sugar for built in react functions for constructing a tree, which can be easily swappable with your own implementation. I recall years ago using a babel plugin that just emitted static HTML from JSX. I know Vue.js v2 also had JSX support that way.

I think LLMs, despite already being trained massively on React, can easily adapt their output to suit a new framework's-specific API surface with a simple adjustment to the prompt. Maybe include an abbreviated list of type/function signatures that are specific to your new framework and just tell the LLM to use JSX for the views?

What I think will definitely be a challenge for new library authors in the age of LLMs is state management. There are already tons of libraries that basically achieve the same thing but have vastly different APIs. In this case, new lib-authors may be forced to just write pluggable re-implementations of existing libraries just to enable LLMs to emit compilable/runnable code. Though I dont know of any state management library that dominates the web like React does with the view layer.

I'm not really sure why this focuses so much on React, when it's a general "issue"/"feature"

More broadly, obviously there is some pressure to use a framework/library/programminglang/editor that has better LLM training. But even before LLMs.. you'd want to choose the one that has more SO questions, more blog posts and books published about it. The one where you can hire experienced programmers.

New players has a certain activation energy they need to overcome - which is probably good. B/c it slows down the churn of new shiny with incrementally improvements. I think a paradigm shift is sufficient though. Programmers like new shiny things - especially the good ones that are passionate about their craft

I find pretty much all models in vscode decent enough on Vue+Quasar. The fact they make bad choices I don't blame on them not understanding Vue.

I absolutely wouldn't be swapping because the output 'isn't good enough'.

And while the bulk of the internet stagnates into mediocrity is there a competitive advantage for people who never let their actual skills dull?

Thanks god. The days people kept inventing new JS frameworks or even dialects (coffeescript, remember?) every three months couldn't be gone fast enough.

I embraced this when I had the same realisation that React will get reinforced the most, and vibe-coded something in it.

I had to ditch the whole thing and rewrite it in Vue when it got big enough that I couldn’t debug it without learning React.

Vibe-coding something in a stack you know or want to know means you can get off your high horse and peek into the engine.

I still agree with the sentiment that React is winning; if the competition of volume. But other frameworks won’t stop existing unless you believe that people exclusively choose what is dominant. But there will always be artisans, even after all old people who learned the alternatives were flushed out.

LLMs are great at HTMX and Python. Both Claude Code and Codex do well at it so I’m fine with things like that. React is fine but HTMX does well. I also frequently used to copy Claude’s generated React things into ChatGPT and ask it to rewrite them in Vanilla JS and it would work but that was a year ago when artifacts were just being launched.