Recent projects triggered a suspicion: AI seems to be a bit more effective with vanilla JavaScript than frameworks. This is not a conclusion. It is just a hunch shaped by experience using Kiro IDE. I’m curious whether others observe the same.
Personal Observation, Not Conclusion
Across several recent projects, AI appeared a bit more precise when debugging vanilla JavaScript. With frameworks, responses sometimes felt indirect or overly abstract. This is not a measured evidence. This is just a repeated impression worth questioning.
Framework Abstraction Complexity
Frameworks introduce layers: virtual DOM, hooks, lifecycle, conventions. My hunch is that these abstractions might blur the signal for AI systems. Vanilla JavaScript exposes intent more directly, possibly making reasoning paths simpler.
Signals From Research
Some studies, such as the one at https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06251, suggest that AI models perform significantly worse on frameworks than on vanilla HTML/CSS. This doesn’t prove anything. This is just a small hint that context matters (when developing the front end).
Community Anecdotes
Developers, as Girish Dhamane in his post “Why I stopped using React,” occasionally report simpler debugging and faster performance in vanilla setups, while also expressing frustration with the complexity of frameworks. These are anecdotal signals, not rigorous evidence. These evidences align with my intuition.
Kiro IDE by Amazon
I have recently started developing several human-zero companies that provide various software products and services. I am using the Spec-Driven Development methodology together with the Kiro IDE by Amazon. So far I have already developed the nana.events platform and the prompo.ai web extension. In both cases, I was using Vanilla JS. Two other projects I am working on use ReactJS. Following my recent intuition, I chose to shift one of these two from ReactJS to VanillaJS.
This post is intentionally inconclusive. If you’ve experienced something similar or the opposite, I’d love to hear about it. Maybe, through shared experience, we can better understand when structure helps… and when it gets in the way.
