The thing I like about Svelte the most is that it's closer to raw HTML. Rather than having to keep up with all the React developments if you're not using it all the time.
I don't think that's true anymore. I've seen a few benchmarks where svelte results in less tokens than React frameworks to complete the task. There was a time when LLMs were awful at svelte (especially v5) due to stale knowledge but that's not the case today. The knowledge cutoff isn't so bad and LLMs are much better at copying the patterns in your own codebase rather than relying on baked in knowledge.
These seems like flame bait, but I'll take the question seriously: I would rather write a Svelte application by hand than manage a React one via LLM. It's just a more intuitive framework, fewer pitfalls, cleaner reactivity, and is much more performant out of the box.
In my experience LLMs write mediocre React code: it works, but is the most naive implementation possible for a given task. It needs to be bullied extensively to write performant React that considers prop stability, does updates in event handlers instead of convoluted useEffect chains, etc. I haven't tried Svelte in a while but "lots of React in training data" doesn't feel like a huge boon to me.
every time I see this argument I think of the fact that one of my current side projects is written in D with qt bindings off github - an obscure library for an obscure language - and claude had zero issues with it. I had to guide the architecture pretty heavily, but the fiddly bits of interfacing multithreaded c libraries to D's garbage collector and qt's event loop were all thanks to the LLM, and done a lot quicker than I would have.
i have had similar thoughts. But i hold on to the idea that its still valuable to invent new tools and ways of doing things. other wise, why not just use html css and javascript and not use react at all?
I've had to work on a Next.js for work and much prefer Sveltekit. Excited to try this release!
Edit: This is the benchmark. But if you suspect it's wrong it's always fun to run your own evals. https://martinalderson.com/posts/which-web-frameworks-are-mo...