[anthropodie]

I build simple applications for personal use like issue tracker, day planner, etc,. By default if you ask Claude it will generate React for frontend but I ask it to use HTML/CSS/JS instead. Because as a backend developer that makes sense to me. I find it hard to read the react code and want to avoid having dependency on npm.

It's surprising how well the core technology works without fancy front end frameworks. Claude does most of the grunt work related to CSS/JS allowing me to focus on more interesting things. I only have to do few minor changes here and there which I am happy to do.

[tajd]

Yes, 100% this. I’ve seen this idea before somewhere, but I wouldn’t be surprised if people started to basically develop more of their own software from first principles like this.

I was doing it today to create a gantt chart from mermaid.

I’ve built other applications inside react components as react seems relatively stable - I don’t really care about react though, only that it has a lot of training data for it.

[0x000xca0xfe]

Yeah it's surprising how easy many things really are. I asked Claude to spice up another vanilla JS/HTML app with a Material UI like touch ripple effect and... it simply did.

Was just around 100 lines of CSS/JS. No need to rewrite everything.

[ericmcer]

Of course it works without frontend frameworks, but if you develop a frontend application using plain JS your core problem is still the one frameworks solve: syncing your application state with the DOM.

At first you can do this manually using selectors, but a complex app will need to be capable of doing this to hundreds of elements whenever state changes. At that point you will build some kind of abstraction because manually updating every element would be insanity. That abstraction might be a simple virtual DOM, and now you are halfway to building your own React.