AI: End of a Craft

I'm sure you've heard all of this before: I can feel the end is near for true software engineers and the joy in creating/debugging code.  If you've already heard this before you might as well stop now as this is just the same rant as all others.

About Me

I've been throwing code, building random side projects and employed as a software engineer for over 17 years (as of 2026). I have fantastic memories of learning to code in middle school with Qbasic and created some really interesting pixel-art style games.

I now work for an "AI First" company that, like many others out there, drop the word "AI" and instantly have investors and customers interested. I think we are all thinking this is the solve for all problems or will be an automatic "win" for any company doing anything. And honestly so far I've seen some serious gains in not just development speed but also improved handling of nearly ANY day-to-day work by anyone in the company.

Frameworks: The End

Going to say it: React is the end. I believe we've seen the last "developer friendly" framework for web application development. Think about why React exists. It's intended to make complex, enterprise grade, and large team development of web applications easier. And "easier" because it's a documented framework that people have similar patterns for solving similar problems. Need a modal? Done the same. Need a form? Done the same.

But now with AI being able to basically construct an entire framework in a weekend by a single engineer (see Container CSS) what's the point? Do developers need to read React to debug? No, AI will debug for you in fact it'll not only debug but it'll fix the issues as well. Do you really need to "read the code"? I know some engineers are complaining that we are basically just reading what AI provides to make sure it's not doing something sketch. Thing is, we could have AI also do that as well.

So then why even have a framework or even a consistent format from one codebase, page, component to the next? Consistency helps engineers understand, debug and enhance any portion of your large app quicker because all of the same patterns are still there. But with AI it's simply "hey go fix this thing, make it do Y", AI doesn't care about consistency in the code. In fact it doesn't even care about consistency in the end product unless told so (and even as of this week it's clever enough to sort of stay in-the-box).

I feel like AI is just playing our game right now, very soon we will be playing it's game. What does that mean for engineers like me? It means we will simply be the point of contact for anyone too fearful of the codebase to have AI edit it themselves. Engineers basically become the "control gate" for the AI swarm that maintains the actual application.

Does Performance Matter?

One of the things I hear a bit too is "we better make this more performant". Now we all know just throwing faster hardware at stuff has basically been the answer to most issues. In 17 years of development I've only had performance issues with anything I've written a handful of times. Is that because I write performant code? Maybe, but mostly because I don't need to venture from any defined box.

AI will spew out mountains of code to fix an issue, it'll create convoluted and complex answers to sometimes simple problems (as of today, that'll change in a year). But do you have to care? Does it work? Yes... then ship it. No one cares anymore if what you wrote by hand is actually performant or maintainable, they'll just send AI after it anyway.

So write code as it makes sense to you, AI will be able to read it, co-workers will be able to read it. But don't stress about performance, no one cares anymore. No one cares about the number of network calls, no one cares about size of the initial download....

Vanilla for the Win

This is the point where I actually get excited. I can see some potential where the vanilla aspects of things come back. HTML has been around for basically forever, same with many other technologies (BASH, etc). We all know vanilla HTML/CSS/JS is actually quite capable now, so whole framework wrappers around inputs, forms, etc is almost pointless in the world of AI.

Try this out with your AI of choice: "Build me a Reddit style forum website, complete with a Supabase database and authentication. Do it all using Vite and vanilla js/html/css". I haven't done this yet, but thinking about what it would produce I had to slap my own hand thinking "oh man it may not be performant" (see previous section).

What you'd get is actually something pretty impressive, and it's hardly less readable than these overly complex NextJS/React/etc frameworks. In fact they are all wrapping vanilla anyway so what you end up reading is "through the lines to see the vanilla underneath". Hell, NextJS "solved" some of the data transmission and state issues that React apps had by implementing the Server Side Rendering... we had that with vanilla! We had that with php! Why is this "new"? Submit a form to the server, have it render the next page, serve it up.  You don't need a framework to do that.

So get out there, still use AI like crazy and have it build vanilla style applications. With that you'll learn the foundations that aren't being shaken away at least for a few more years. See how far you can get with just vanilla (hint you can make any web app that exists today) and see if it is actually maintainable. Accidentally create a framework to handle reactive client-side updates, AI can spew that type of thing out in seconds.