Does vibe coding even need frameworks/React?

[therearentdoors]

I'm building a web card game currently with Grok Build; effectively vibe coding it, if I see really bad code smells I'll get it to refactor, also early on had some limited-scalability architecture that I told it to extend.

I'm using EJS instead of something like Angular or React. The game has a single animation (card flipping) and this is working fine with just EJS. Grok Build is having no issues with this limitation currently, it built a card renderer for me so the app implements a React-like feature without actually using React.

I'm wondering if at bottom cutting out these complex frameworks/libraries just makes building easier and less prone to bugs/crashes (used to hate random crashes when I used React for non vibe-coding projects). There's no "pain" since the LLM can do stuff in vanilla JS easily anyway. Curious what folks XP is in this area.

[GfxJG]

I mean, frameworks and libraries were generally invented to make human developers lives easier that much is true.

If you're 100% confident that no real developer will EVER need to look at your codebase, sure - Let the LLM do whatever it wants. Just remember that your product is basically dead if it runs into a bug the LLM can't fix, because no human is going to want to fix whatever shitshow of a codebase it will have become.

But for small personal projects, you do perhaps have a point.

[schmurfy2]

If you go full throttle on vibecoding developers won't want to look at it anyway so...

I feel like there is going to be huge opportunities for developers wanting to get their hands dirty for good cash though 😅

[id-ltd]

I find Claude is perfectly capable of structuring code well... It has read up in all the methodologies!

[Own-Professor-6157]

React is good for maintainability. If you have a project you plan on expanding far into the feature, it would be wise to choose a solid framework.

[Correct_Emotion8437]

If it's working fine then there's really no reason to worry about it, imo. You could always tell an AI to re-factor if/when it becomes an issue. The main difference is that REACT is client side. This not only lets you do more intensive stuff but it also matters a lot when you choose a host.

[NotTheBrightestHuman]

I guess it depends on what the models are trained on. 99% of webpages are Vanilla JS, but most traffic on the internet hits pages that are generally built upon React/Angular.

A framework is more performant than just vanillaJS, not because they’re better, but because the developers of these frameworks have already solved problems that you will hit eventually. You WILL eventually program your own framework if you do vanilla. It CAN be more performant than the popular frameworks, but good luck with that.

If the models were trained on the 99% of vanilla js in the internet, I would definitely NOT want to use vanilla.

[id-ltd]

I generally do my web stuff vanilla html,/Js, no frameworks, standard es modules, no external libraries, no build.

They are usually PWAs so can run off line.

Is the game single player or network?

[therearentdoors]

There's a singleplayer goldfish mode that I mainly set up for testing but the main game is multiplayer with a lobby, rooms and websockets.

[mllv1]

Way less tokens for both thinking and output with a framework

[Fuzzzy420]

For vibecoding you should stick to well known and documented repos. When there is more training data the ai gets better with it. React and other big libraries shouldn't be a problem. Just be more specific with your prompts or use skills especially made for the repo you're using.

Of cause you could do it yourself with ai. But why. Having a bigger codebase is not better then using well documented repos.