AI Writes Better UI Without React Than With It

I recently shipped a desktop app. No React. No npm. No node_modules. AI generated most of the UI code, and it worked better without a framework than it ever would have with one. Streaming real-time content, managing complex state, drag-and-drop reordering, resizable layouts -- all in plain Web Components and imperative DOM manipulation. Zero runtime dependencies. This wasn't an ideological choice. It just turned out that when AI writes your UI, frameworks get in the way more than they help. Why frameworks existed Think about what React actually solved when it came out. The browser DOM API was painful. Managing state across components was a mess. Keeping the UI in sync with data required tons of boilerplate. Frameworks abstracted all of that away. But that was 2013. Since then, two things changed: The platform caught up. Web Components, custom elements, CustomEvent , CSS custom properties, prefers-color-scheme , ResizeObserver , MutationObserver , template literals. The browser now has