I Don't Like Magic

I get the sentiment, but "I don’t like magic" feels like a luxury belief.

Electricity is magic. TCP is magic. Browsers are hall-of-mirrors magic. You’ll never understand 1% of what Chromium does, and yet we all ship code on top of it every day without reading the source.

Drawing the line at React or LLMs feels arbitrary. The world keeps moving up the abstraction ladder because that’s how progress works; we stand on layers we don’t fully understand so we can build the next ones. And yes LLM outputs are probabilistic, but that's how random CSS rendering bugs felt to me before React took care of them

The cost isn’t magic; the cost is using magic you don’t document or operationalize.

The advantage of frameworks is to have a "common language" to achieve some goals together with a team. A good framework hides some of the stupid mistakes you would do when you would try to develop that "language" from scratch.

When you do a project from scratch, if you work enough on it, you end up wishing you would have started differently and you refactor pieces of it. While using a framework I sometimes have moments where I suddenly get the underlying reasons and advantages of doing things in a certain way, but that comes once you become more of a power user, than at start, and only if you put the effort to question. And other times the framework is just bad and you have to switch...

You could walk through the framework so you then understand it. There are several "let's create react from scratch" articles

https://pomb.us/build-your-own-react/

Certain frameworks were so useful they arguably caused an explosion the productivity. Rails seems like one. React might be too.

So you don’t like compilers? Or do you really full understand how they are working? How they are transforming your logic and your asynchronous code into machine code etc.

The AI pilled view is coding is knitting and AI is an automated loom.

But it is not quite the case. The hand coded solution may be quicker than AI at reaching the business goal.

If there is an elegant crafted solution that stays in prod 10 years and just works it is better than an initially quicker AI coded solution that needs more maintenance and demands a team to maintain it.

If AI (and especially bad operators of AI) codes you a city tower when you need a shed, the tower works and looks great but now you have 500k/y in maintaining it.

If you have this attitude I hope you write everything in assembly. Except assembly is compiled into micro-ops, so hopefully you avoid that by using an 8080 (according to a quick search, the last Intel CPU to not have micro-ops.)

In other words, why is one particular abstraction (e.g. Javscript, or the web browser) ok, but another abstraction (e.g. React) not? This attitude doesn't make sense to me.

> And so now we have these “magic words” in our codebases. Spells, essentially. Spells that work sometimes. Spells that we cast with no practical way to measure their effectiveness. They are prayers as much as they are instructions.

Autovectorization is not a programming model. This still rings true day after day.

What I cannot build. I do not understand

I've used React on projects and understand its usefulness, but also React has killed my love of frontend development. And now that everyone is using it to build huge, clunky SPAs instead of normal websites that just work, React has all but killed my love of using the web, too.

This person's distinction between "library" and "framework" is frankly insane.

React, which just is functions to make DOM trees and render them is a framework? There is a reason there are hundreds of actual frameworks that exist to make structure about using these functions.

At this point, he should stop using any high level language! Java/python are just a big frameworks calling his bytecode, what magical frameworks!

Predicated upon the definition of "magic" provided in the article: What is it, if anything, about magic that draws people to it? Is there a process wherein people build tolerance and acceptance to opaque abstractions through learning? Or, is it acceptance that "this is the way things are done", upheld by cargo cult development, tutorials, examples, and the like, for the sake of commercial expediency? I can certainly understand that seldom is time afforded to building a deep understanding of the intent, purpose, and effect of magic abstractions under such conditions.

Granted, there are limits to how deep one should need to go in understanding their ecosystem of abstractions to produce meaningful work on a viable timescale. What effect does it have on the trade to, on the other hand, have no limit to the upward growth of the stack of tomes of magical frameworks and abstractions?

If you are the only person who ever touches your code, fine, otherwise I despise this attitude and would insta-reject any candidate who said this. In a team setting, "I don't like magic" and "I don't want to learn a framework" means: "I want you to learn my bespoke framework I'm inevitably going to write."

> I’ve always avoided client-side React because of its direct harm to end users (over-engineered bloated sites that take way longer to load than they need to).

A couple of megabytes of JavaScript is not the "big bloated" application in 2026 that is was in 1990.

Most of us have phones in our pockets capable of 500Mbps.

The payload of an single page app is trivial compared to the bandwidth available to our devices.

I'd much rather optimise for engineer ergonomics than shave a couple of milliseconds off the initial page load.

I also don't like magic, but React is the wrong definition of magic in this case. It's an abstraction layer for UI and one that is pretty simple when you think about it conceptually. The complexity is by third party library that are building on top of it, but proposing complex machineries instead of simple ones. Then you have a culture of complexity around simple technology.

But it does seems that culture of complexity is more pervasive lately. Things that could have been a simple gist or a config change is a whole program that pulls tens of dependencies from who knows who.

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