I actually like React's virtual DOM approach. It might not be the fastest possible solution, not the most elegant syntax, not particularly concise. but I can at least understand what it does and how data flows. I learned the hard way that with reactive programming (whether you call it observables, runes, signals, whatever) you can lose that understanding and it's a huge pain when that happens.
In this case that‘s actually a security vulnerability, I‘ve also seen a case where it built an api with auth but added a route where anyone could just PUT a new API key into it. Sometimes its own code review catches these, sometimes it does not.
I have the freedom to work with AI tools as much as I as I want and kind of lead the team in the direction I see fit.
It’s a lot of fun for exploring ideas. I’ve built things very fast that I would not have done at all otherwise. I have rewritten a huge chunk of semi-outdated docs into something useful with a couple of
Prompts in a day. Claude does all the annoying dependency update breaks the build kinds of things. And the reviews are extremely useful and a perfect combination with human review as they catch things extremely well that humans are bad at catching.
But in the production codebase changes must be made with much more consideration. Claude tends to perform well ob some tasks but for other I end up wasting time because I just don’t know up front how the feature must look so I cannot write a spec at the level of precision that claude needs and changing code manually is more efficient for this kind of discovery for me than dealing with large chunks of constantly changing code.
And then there’s the fact that claude produces things that work and do the thing described in the prompt extremely well but they are always also wring in sone way. When I let AI build a large chunk of code and actually go through the code there’s always a mess somewhere that ai review doesn’t see because it looks completely plausible but contains some horrible security issue or complete inconsistency with the rest of the codebase or, you know, that custom yaml parser nobody asked for and that you don’t want your day job to depend on.
And just like svelte this is elegant exactly until you realize that it is not possible to correctly track all the dependencies and just like svelte you realize that a mix of explicit and implicit reactivity is really hard to debug and then you seitch to explicit reactivity and then you are just as complex as any other reactivity based framework