Developer Advocates Vanilla JS and AI Tools Over Frameworks and Abstractions

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A frontend developer with experience dating back to 2007 has outlined a personal philosophy built around native Web APIs, Node.js built-ins, and AI-assisted coding rather than popular frameworks like React or Express. The developer argues that years of witnessing dependency deprecations, breaking changes, and supply-chain vulnerabilities have reinforced a preference for standard platform features. Having stepped away from commercial development in 2019, they draw a clear distinction between professional codebases that demand scale and hobbyist projects that prioritize simplicity and direct understanding. They view AI tools as a natural evolution alongside linters and autocomplete, useful for generating boilerplate, documentation, and unit tests without replacing human judgment. To keep AI-assisted work grounded, the developer applies a self-described THINK checklist evaluating whether output is true, helpful, inspiring, necessary, and kind to end users.

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