These are my opinions and are ruminations on what might be happening as more and more developers use LLMs and Frameworks to build on the web. In October last year I wrote “will developers care about frameworks in the future?” predicting that LLMs would abstract away framework choice. I was wrong—or at least, wrong about the timeline. The reality is more interesting and more permanent: React isn’t competing with other frameworks anymore. React has become the platform. And if you’re building a new framework, library or browser feature today, you need to understand that you’re not just competing with React—you’re competing against a self-reinforcing feedback loop between LLM training data, system prompts, and developer output that makes displacing React functionally impossible.

Note

I've noticed the same trend Paul Kinlan describes. We're at a point where React isn't just the most popular JavaScript framework anymore — it's become its own platform.

New frameworks are "dead on arrival." React has become the platform because LLMs generate React by default. It's a self-reinforcing loop: more React in training data → more React in output. For LLMs, a prompt like "build me a website" is basically synonymous with "build me a React app."

That said, I've found that Vue.js and Nuxt work just fine too — though you occasionally need to point the LLM back to the documentation. The model doesn't default to them, but it can be guided.

React's top position will likely stay for a long time. And honestly? That makes me a bit sad. It means fast-paced frontend development is probably going to slow down significantly. We shouldn't expect many major innovations in the near future.

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