I love the hands-on developer experience of programming in Svelte. But since we're in October of 2026 I have to ask, is the vibe-coding experience in Svelte any different than in React? Can anyone with experience in both comment?
Yes. We open sourced an SSG based off SvelteKit about a year ago and were starting building AI tooling and product workflows around it, <a href="https://statue.dev" rel="nofollow">https://statue.dev but have since mothballed it.
For most of 2024-2025 frontier models really struggled with Svelte 4 vs 5 compatibility issues. Some of the main contributors, to their credit, really put in a lot of work to create benchmarks/MCP/other tools to make AI better at using Svelte. Personally I am just not a fan of MCP and other tools like that at all, and decided I'd rather just use vanilla css/js for new projects.
Look at this; it's literally multiple times more expensive to have a model sifting through all this stuff in every context use them with a tool: <a href="https://svelte.dev/docs/ai/prompts/llms.txt" rel="nofollow">https://svelte.dev/docs/ai/prompts/llms.txt All of these are input tokens and turns to gather context.
The "too niche to be a major training priority" dilemma is actually a really big problem that almost all new or emerging dev tools have now. Incumbents and category leaders are priorities and show up in major benchmarks, so models develop excellent tacit knowledge and capabilities with them and expose it everywhere all the time for "free" in their weights. Everything else is at a major disadvantage because models don't know about them, how to use them, how they work, what they're for/why, and every time you use them you pay a big capability and token hit because models only learn about them in-context.
I don't blame the Svelte team for this at all. There should be a better way for devtool projects to contribute to frontier labs training pipelines or properly posttrain their own agent coding models.
This is why I switched to Astro/React in 2024. I wonder where I would be now if I had stuck things out. Svelte is very fast and elegant. I found that I can use Astro for anything I thought I might need NextJS for though.
I still use Svelte but I switched to Astro too. I think the best thing about it is that its devs are focused on building primarily a good ssg.
The Svelte people are primarily building a frontend framework and added sveltekit as an addition. Using Svelte in astro even feels nicer to me.
I strongly recommend vanilla html, js, and css. For me the benefits of having no npm and related ecosystem tools and no dependencies far outweigh any benefits you get from switching to specific framework. It took me just as long to learn modern css, html, and basically all the browser APIs as it did to learn how to setup+build+modify+deploy my svelte-vscodeextension-webview project without getting bogged down in the tooling.
All those tools and packages are constantly making breaking changes or introducing incompatibility issues or becoming obsolete, and there is so much maintenance. I went pretty deep on CSR/SSG/browser automation over the past two years and realized that everything you get out of these tools is probably 20-400 lines of javascript you could just ask an LLM to implement when you need it. I’ve seen people waste so many hours, days, and weeks on tailwind ui crap (solvable in minutes with css), vitest and object lifecycle crap (use the browser debugger, do e2e tests) and major version upgrades (there’s about 95% less of this in the browser and >99% less outside experimental APIs).
I think for Facebook/Github sized web applications, with really big teams and lots of custom tooling (eg React) these frameworks make sense. Most websites just need basic file serving/rendering, to send and respond to http requests, and some javascript to run on the client (but html and css can actually handle many core UI patterns). I’ve been much happier not using frameworks because my projects just work and the knowledge I build doesn’t constantly churn.
stillatit · · focus · HN ↗
weitendorf · · focus · HN ↗
For most of 2024-2025 frontier models really struggled with Svelte 4 vs 5 compatibility issues. Some of the main contributors, to their credit, really put in a lot of work to create benchmarks/MCP/other tools to make AI better at using Svelte. Personally I am just not a fan of MCP and other tools like that at all, and decided I'd rather just use vanilla css/js for new projects.
Look at this; it's literally multiple times more expensive to have a model sifting through all this stuff in every context use them with a tool: <a href="https://svelte.dev/docs/ai/prompts/llms.txt" rel="nofollow">https://svelte.dev/docs/ai/prompts/llms.txt All of these are input tokens and turns to gather context.
The "too niche to be a major training priority" dilemma is actually a really big problem that almost all new or emerging dev tools have now. Incumbents and category leaders are priorities and show up in major benchmarks, so models develop excellent tacit knowledge and capabilities with them and expose it everywhere all the time for "free" in their weights. Everything else is at a major disadvantage because models don't know about them, how to use them, how they work, what they're for/why, and every time you use them you pay a big capability and token hit because models only learn about them in-context.
I don't blame the Svelte team for this at all. There should be a better way for devtool projects to contribute to frontier labs training pipelines or properly posttrain their own agent coding models.
tonyoconnell · · focus · HN ↗
sureglymop · · focus · HN ↗
weitendorf · · focus · HN ↗
All those tools and packages are constantly making breaking changes or introducing incompatibility issues or becoming obsolete, and there is so much maintenance. I went pretty deep on CSR/SSG/browser automation over the past two years and realized that everything you get out of these tools is probably 20-400 lines of javascript you could just ask an LLM to implement when you need it. I’ve seen people waste so many hours, days, and weeks on tailwind ui crap (solvable in minutes with css), vitest and object lifecycle crap (use the browser debugger, do e2e tests) and major version upgrades (there’s about 95% less of this in the browser and >99% less outside experimental APIs).
I think for Facebook/Github sized web applications, with really big teams and lots of custom tooling (eg React) these frameworks make sense. Most websites just need basic file serving/rendering, to send and respond to http requests, and some javascript to run on the client (but html and css can actually handle many core UI patterns). I’ve been much happier not using frameworks because my projects just work and the knowledge I build doesn’t constantly churn.