Whenever you tell an AI, “build me a login page,” it writes React. Not Svelte. Not Solid. Not Vue. React. And that default is unobtrusively but strongly shaping the future of the web as a whole.
I've been mulling this over since I came across the Dead Framework Theory. The argument is simple and uncomfortable: LLMs are trained on massive amounts of existing code, and React dominates that training data by a landslide. AI generates React code. Humans integrate that React code and ship it. It's now new code for the model to learn from. And so on.
This situation is like a feedback loop that nobody constructed a way out of.
The loop that feeds itself
Here's how it works in simple terms.
→ React has the most tutorials, the most Stack Overflow answers, the most open-source repos.
→ LLMs absorb all of that and learn that "web app" basically means "React app."
→ New developers use AI to scaffold projects and get React by default.
→ Those projects produce more React code on the public internet.
→ The next generation of models trains on that code.
Each cycle tightens the grip. It's not a conspiracy. It's just math. The biggest corpus wins the autocompletion lottery.
Why this should bother you
I don't have anything against React. I've used it plenty. But a monoculture is dangerous in any ecosystem.
The way Svelte's compiler-first approach truly stands out. The real problems Solid's fine-grained reactivity solves are still problems React just doesn't address. These aren't play things -- they're real innovation in how we conceptualize rendering and state. If AI-assisted coding silently starves them of potential users, we all lose.
It's not alarming that React has become popular. What is alarming though is that this popularity is now being reinforced by machines, in a manner that has never existed in the past. Human hype cycles eventually cool down. But this may not.
"Just fine-tune the models"
The obvious counterargument: we can fine-tune LLMs on Svelte or Solid codebases and fix the bias. And actual business applications written in the non-canonical implementation aren’t irrelevant. Critics of the Dead Framework Theory say exactly this.
However, fine-tuning is expensive, time-consuming, and requires continuous investment. Who would pay for it? The framework authors who are already struggling with their open-source sustainability? Should the Svelte community come up with the money to fine-tune a model that would still be in direct competition with React’s "organically" obtained data model?
It's possible in theory. In practice, the incentives don't line up. Companies building AI coding tools optimize for the largest user base. That's React developers. So the default stays React. The loop continues.
The real question is about defaults
Default settings have a strong influence on software. The majority of developers stick with them. Most AI-generated code gets accepted with minor edits, not rewritten from scratch.
When React is the default output of any AI coding tool, React stops only being the most popular framework. It becomes an infrastructural assumption of AI-assisted web development. That’s a different kind of lock-in than “a lot of people use and like this."
I think we're sleepwalking into a world where framework choice is an illusion. Technically, you can choose differently. But your AI tools will fight you every step of the way. Your junior devs will have never seen anything else. Your hiring pipeline will filter for React because that's what candidates learned — from AI.
So what do we do?
To be honest, I can't give you a definitive answer on that. However, I believe that AI tooling, which is aware of the framework you are using and prompts you to select it before generating any code, is important. Also, I think that anyone developing coding assistance tools should consider training data diversity as a primary issue.
And I think we need to talk about this now, before the loop gets another two or three training cycles deeper.
What do you think – is AI-driven framework lock-in a serious problem, or will things work out in the end? I’d especially love to hear from folks working on non-React frameworks. Is the pain already setting in? Drop your comments below! 👇
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