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Comment by killingtime74 | Hacker News Reader

The thing I like about Svelte the most is that it's closer to raw HTML. Rather than having to keep up with all the React developments if you're not using it all the time.

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yes! I learned React first, and then Svelte. Svelte seems to have all the benefits without any of the React abstractions that are more pain than they’re worth.

Is anyone hand-writing code anymore though in 2026? I don't think many people these days have to worry about "keeping up with all the React developments", because Claude/Codex handles all that now.

Yes. I can understand a backend engineer who wants to slap together a frontend just deferring the whole thing to LLMs but there are a lot of frontend engineers out there that care a lot about performance and the like who are absolutely keeping up with React developments, no matter whether the final code is LLM generated or not.

There's not really any way to make a website look exactly how you want it to look without manually fiddling with its HTML and CSS. I took the agent pill as soon as I could and never looked back, but it's truly much more work to ask the model to make small changes in natural language, observe, and iterate when you can just open the developer console and do it yourself. That said, I modify the site by hand only enough to get it into a state where I can dump it on an agent to finish up.

I handwrite plenty of code. I know what I want the thing to do, how I want it to behave, or how I want it to look; the LLM can't read my mind and doesn't get it all the way there.

To quote Mordin Solus: "Had to be me. Someone else might have gotten it wrong."

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