How AI changed the way I pick frameworks, and the two places React survived
That 130-file PR that shipped KeyEcho 1.0 contained a decision I never wrote about: the desktop app moved from Tauri 1 + Vue to Tauri 2 + SolidJS. The same summer, upweb.dev moved from Nuxt 4 to SolidStart, and keyecho.app (SSR, five languages, Stripe checkout) was built on SolidStart from scratch. Three separate decisions, same answer every time. Scope first. This post is about defaults for my personal projects. Near the end I'll cover two places where I still use React, one of which runs very well. The criteria changed Most of the code in my repos is AI-generated now. My job has shifted from writing code to reviewing it. The old framework checklist put most of its weight on learning curve and developer experience. Both are worth zero now: the model writes five frameworks fluently and knows the rules of hooks better than most humans do. AI crushed the price of writing code. Two costs didn't move: the runtime bytes every user downloads, and the human hours spent reviewing. Pick your stack by the new prices. Runtime cost lives in the architecture. No prompt removes it, so it decides the framework. Review bandwidth is finite, and AI throughput will grind down any consistency that is maintained by verbal agreement, so it decides the styling layer. I have seen more than one React codebase a few years into its life: two animation libraries, two carousel components, three styling systems, each introduced for a perfectly good reason on some ticket, and the sum is a mess nobody can clean up. AI did not invent that drift. It made it an order of magnitude faster. React is no longer my default: size and performance Let me discard the weak arguments first. Dependency arrays, stale closures, re-render storms: I am not going to relitigate any of it. The model knows the rules of hooks cold, eslint-plugin-react-hooks catches most slips, and React Compiler now handles memoization. The ergonomics debate no longer produces a winner. What still produces a winner is the client. react-do