⚛️ Do frameworks even matter anymore?

Hey guys,

Welcome to another edition of Import React by Cosden Solutions!

This Week In React asked on X whether average devs still care about React, and the Remix team's Brooks Lybrand wrote about the bigger version of that question, do frameworks even matter when an agent writes the code? Also in this issue, Evan thinks we're all heading for our own "slop fork", Google had a mole inside the gang behind this spring's supply chain attacks, and a TanStack Query setup that works great right up until 200 events land in one second.

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🤔 Do Frameworks Even Matter Anymore?
If LLMs write the React and nobody reads the .tsx files, why keep the abstraction at all? Brooks Lybrand from the Remix team takes the question seriously. His answer: skip the framework and your agent quietly builds a worse one. He's also got a view on what should replace the frameworks we use today.

🥊 Evan You Isn't Buying Lovable's Rust Vite Benchmark
Lovable spins up about a million Vite dev servers a day, so one of its engineers rewrote the dev server in Rust. It's called OJ, and it reads your existing vite.config.ts. Then Evan You looked at the numbers. He disputes the benchmark, and his prediction for where AI rewrites like this end up is pretty bleak.

📡 Poor Man's Real Time With TanStack Query
Someone on r/reactjs wants the server to push a list of queries to invalidate over a websocket after every mutation. The top reply: they built exactly that, it worked, and then it caused them a lot of grief. The websocket was never the hard part. Read the thread before you wire up a bus that fires 50 times a minute.

🎛️ React Bits Just Dropped 30 Free Micro-Interactions
A new Micro category full of the small motion details that make a UI feel finished. All free, all customisable, and you can play with every one of them in the browser. Go click around.

🕵️ Google Had A Mole Inside The Mini Shai-Hulud Gang
Remember the supply chain attacks that kept cascading through the JS ecosystem this spring? A Google analyst was sitting in the attackers' group chat the whole time. WIRED has the story of how they were watched and taken down. It ended in two arrests.

🛠️ Helix: The Tool Behind Shopify's Move Off React Native
Last week Shopify said it's going back to native. This is the how. Their takeaway: agents are powerful, but getting the same result twice is the hard part. Here's the tooling and guardrails they had to build to get there.

🎟️ 10% Off droidCon, reactCon And All Of next.app devCon
If Shopify's move has you rethinking native, droidCon is where that argument happens in person. It's 7–9 October in Berlin, and one ticket gets you full 3-day access to every next.app devCon event: droidCon, reactCon, swiftCon, flutterCon, agentic codingCon, the techlead summit and more. Use code IMPORT_REACT for 10% off your ticket.

📚 How Do You Keep React Docs Useful Once They Get Big?
A small dev tools startup with a React SDK: setup guides, edge cases, a different integration path for every kind of app, and people still pinging engineers with questions the docs technically answer. The top reply is one change that stopped their examples going stale. The rest of the thread argues about whether that's enough.

🎨 Linear Moved Off styled-components In 1,000+ PRs
Linear swapped styled-components for StyleX across its React apps. Speed was part of it, but the reason that'll sell it to your team is a different one.

🦀 GitHub Ported Copilot's Runtime From Node To Rust
Piece by piece, behind napi-rs shims, while still shipping every day. Startup time and memory pushed them into it. The good part is the list of regressions they hit, and if you've ever ported JS to anything, at least one will look familiar.

👻 React's Activity Can Render Without Running Your Effects
<Activity> can render a hidden tree without mounting its effects. That quietly turned a legacy hook into a leak. Here's what to audit before you swap your conditional rendering for it.

📝 How Notion Handles Everyone Editing The Same Page
The CRDTs behind Notion's concurrent editing, straight from the team. Worth it if you've ever tried to build "Google Docs, but for X".

Quick Links

🤖 Opus 5.5 And GPT-6 Sol/Luna Landed The Same Week
Anthropic says Opus 5.5 costs 40% less per task than Opus 5, at $4/$20 per million input/output tokens. OpenAI's GPT-6 Sol and Luna are the faster, cheaper end of the GPT-6 family. Artificial Analysis already has Opus 5.5 at #1 out of 212 models.

🎯 Can Jev Beat A Constant?
Jev is the new "decision model" everyone's talking about: it returns probabilities instead of text, fast and cheap. One team ran it on 100 real agent tool calls. 79 of them were harmless, so just answering "harmless" every time scores 79% too. Whether Jev beat that is in the post.

🙅 Martin Fowler: I Don't Like LLMs
He'll admit they're useful and thorough. His problem is what the fake confidence says about the companies building them. A 3-minute read.

🌀 The Senior Engineer Death Spiral
New senior hire goes dark for weeks on a huge solo project to prove themselves, then burns out. If you've just changed jobs, read this one.

✅ Bend Wants To Formally Verify Your Vibe-Coded App
A Python-ish language where you write rules your code has to obey, and your agent writes the proofs. Break a rule and the compiler fails. Its own homepage tells you to expect bugs.

See you next week!

Darius

P.S. Someone turned their personal website into a pixel-art world with a playable boss fight, all in plain JS and CSS. Go fight it.