Coming from React, switching to Vue feels like moving from a toolkit to a lifestyle. In React, you build your own world. In Vue, the world is already built—it just hands you the keys.
I didn’t expect to like Vue. I thought it would feel like jQuery-in-a-Component™—useful, sure, but inelegant.
What I found instead was a different mental model, a developer experience centered around clarity over control, and a stack that didn’t just work—it felt like it wanted to work.
So far, we have covered some basic building blocks of Vue, now let’s walk through how to think in Vue.
You Start in the Template
In React, you think in functions. JSX lets you freely mix JS with UI logic, and components are just functions returning markup (well, kind of).
In Vue, components are still the unit of abstraction, but your mind lives in the template (Read, HTML) first, not the JavaScript. You declare the structure, and let the logic serve the view—not the other way around.
Refs, Reactivity, and Giving Up Control
Vue’s reactivity system is beautiful—but opaque at times.
const count = ref(0)
watchEffect(() => {
console.log(count.value)
})
At first glance, ref feels like useState, but it’s not. There’s no setCount. There’s .value. Why? Because Vue's reactivity is a compiler-level magic trick. .value feels like a leaky abstraction until you understand that Vue tracks reactivity at the dependency access level, not via closures like React. You don’t call setCount, you just mutate.
React’s state is explicit. You tell it what to track.
Vue’s reactivity is implicit. It watches what you do.
That’s both powerful and dangerous. As a React dev, I miss knowing exactly when a re-render will happen. In Vue, I find myself guessing—“Will this trigger?”—until I learn to read the reactivity graph in my head.
DevTools, DX, and Debugging
Vue DevTools is, frankly, excellent—especially for Composition API, and Nuxt takes it to another level. You can watch ref values, debug computed props, trace the reactive chain. In many ways, it’s more helpful than React DevTools, which is still stuck in prop/state land.
But Vue lacks a consistent story around error handling. React has ErrorBoundary, Suspense, boundary layering. Vue's support is... "meh." Errors bubble weirdly. Async flows are unclear. The DX around failure feels undercooked.
Vue’s DX is optimised for developer happiness. You scaffold with Vite, auto-import everything, use script setup, and just go. The “happy path” is frictionless.
Community and Convention
React has no center. You pick your own adventure: state management, routing, SSR. It’s a playground and a responsibility.
Vue has a core team with taste. Vue’s community is… practical. Less academic than React’s, less enterprise-driven. The docs are phenomenal. The official ecosystem is cohesive: Vue, Vue Router, Pinia, Vite, Nuxt. It’s all built by the same group and it shows.
I like this a lot.
It reduces cognitive load. You don’t have to debate whether to use Zustand, Jotai, or Redux. You use Pinia. Done.
But the Vue community feels quieter. Less experimental. More consensus-driven. That’s great for productivity, but less exciting when you want to push boundaries.
Converging Paths: The State of Frontend in 2025
I’ve been cooking many unfinished next million dollar ideas (generated using ChatGPT, of course) as side hustles. And in that chaotic creative process, I’ve tried almost every frontend framework out there, hoping to find the best one to build with.
What I found instead was this: all frontend frameworks are basically becoming the same.
Sure, the syntax changes. Some use signals, some use proxies, some hide the reactivity behind compilers. But under the hood? The ideas have aligned. They’ve all embraced component-driven UIs, reactivity-first thinking, and optimized compiler pipelines.
The mental models have started to overlap. What once was React’s “unique take” on UI with JSX and hooks is now reimagined in frameworks like Solid and Qwik. What Vue did with templates and reactivity is now echoed in Svelte’s simplicity and Astro’s island architecture.
It's no longer about choosing a fundamentally different tool. It’s about choosing the one that makes you feel the least friction while building. Some wrap complexity in a friendly DX. Some lean hard into minimalism. Others just try to abstract everything away and hope you don’t notice.
We had the virtual DOM wars in 2015. Now, we’re entering the compiler war era of 2024. Everyone is betting on smarter transforms, tree-shaking, hydration hacks, and edge-ready builds. But the end result feels eerily similar no matter what you pick.
And when everything starts looking the same, developer experience becomes the only hill worth dying on.
That’s why Vue—and more so Nuxt—stood out to me. It doesn’t just work. It works with you. And that’s rare!
Why Nuxt Is the Natural Next Step
Nuxt is not just Next.js for Vue. It’s more integrated, more opinionated, and (arguably) more refined.
- Built-in layouts and file-based routing
- Native support for Vue’s Composition API
- First-class SSR, static generation, and hybrid rendering
- Server API routes and edge functions
It’s Vue at scale. You don’t reach for Nuxt because your app grew too big. You start there.
If you’re learning Vue today, don’t stop at the CLI. Learn Nuxt. Your future self will thank you.
In the next piece, we’ll dive into Nuxt—the patterns, the mental model, the tradeoffs, and why it might be the most underrated full-stack framework right now.
Not because it’s revolutionary. But because it’s complete.
And in a world of converging frameworks, completion is the new differentiation.
Stay tuned.
Top comments (2)
Good to see React people trying Vue. Vue's reactivity is not compile time magic though, except for some compile time macros (defineProps, etc) but those are compile time not for reactivity reasons but because of typescript. You can argue it's seems magical, but it's just pure js proxies + auto dep tracking.
Also Nuxt has NuxtErrorBoundary for errors.
Thank you for correcting me. My learning approach have been mostly struggling with docs (one of the best) and some YouTube, if possible, please guide me with some learning resources.