UpWeb.

DISPATCHESARCHIVE

I stopped defaulting to React, and wrote down the whole argument

Last Wednesday I said the frontend architecture post was coming this Sunday. It's out:

How AI changed the way I pick frameworks, and the two places React survived

This summer produced three separate stack decisions: upweb.dev moved from Nuxt 4 to SolidStart, keyecho.app was built on SolidStart from scratch, and the KeyEcho desktop app went from Vue to Solid. Same answer three times. The post lays out every tradeoff, including the two places where I still run React.

Three things from the post:

  • AI crushed the price of writing code, and learning curves fell out of the framework checklist. Two costs are left, and nobody pays them for you: runtime bytes in the user's browser, and review hours. The five rules at the end all derive from those two.

  • TypeScript 7.0 went GA on the 8th, a native Go compiler, about 10x faster. JSX projects switch the day it ships. Vue and Svelte template type-checking waits for 7.1 in October. Every extra language layer is another place in the upgrade queue.

  • Before and after, same site: on Nuxt 4, upweb.dev sat at 70 on mobile PageSpeed and no amount of Cloudflare-layer tuning would move it. On SolidStart it is 99/100/100/100 with 0 ms TBT. Lab data, boundaries in the post. The 29 points were free, so I took them.

The styling story is in there too: Tailwind and UnoCSS lost their default slot for my new projects, vanilla-extract took it, and both failure modes come with examples you can match against your own repo.

Also this week:

  • Last week's Rust hot-path post (27x) hit #1 on dev.to's week#rust ranking, and the comments are still coming in.

  • KeyEcho 1.1 is packaged and waiting for a release window. It pushes the audio system further, faster decoding, the same line of work as the hot-path post. Full changelog in the release email.

  • Twenty-plus sound packs are done and the store page is nearly there. Faster decoding meets ready-made content: KeyEcho is about to get its own little shop.

  • This newsletter runs on Broadside, my own self-hosted platform: an agent pushes the drafts, models do the data analysis, and I review and press send. Open-sourcing it once it's cleaned up. Separate post then.

If you're picking a stack for a new project right now, reply and tell me where you're stuck. The five rules are my answer; your project's shape may produce a different one.

Zach