The first time this century I got paid to do some frontend dev work was to port a Visual Basic Desktop App to be a webapp in both Netscape 4 and Internet Explorer 4. That was about as much fun as it sounds. Over the next twenty years, it really did not feel that things were getting a lot easier for beginners to get started.
I recently watched "Vite: The Documentary" and found out that, finally, the frontend tooling dumpster fire —sorry, I mean, the remarkably diverse frontend tooling space — was becoming less of an impediment to developer productivity.
There was only one problem: my latest Softgen AI-generated UX prototype used a beautiful infinite scrolling calendar. It had a drag-and-drop feature for moving cards between calendar days. And it was not using a Vite-based framework. Doh!
I was astonished that I could not quickly find an out-of-the-box calendar demo for Svelte 5. I decided to rebuild things in Svelte 5 using Codex, Claude Code, Context7 and any other help I could get. How hard can it be?
Well, not as hard as porting a Visual Basic Desktop App to Netscape 4 😵💫 These days we have Vite and Svelte5 🥇 FTW! Yet it was not without a few false starts.
I began with ndom91/svelte-infinite, a Svelte 5 infinite scroll of static panels. I then had the LLMs add drag-and-drop and got it restyled. Codex and Claude Code needed a ton of coaching to make that happen, with several false starts.
Embedding shorts is broken, so please try this link for the video.
The code is over at simbo1905/svelte-infinite. I sent a PR back to ndom91 that was pretty rough. If you are a Svelte5 expert and have a moment to help make it less of a total beginner attempt, then please do send me a PR.
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Top comments (1)
Nice one