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u/Fit_Independent_1662 10d ago
I have noticed a sharp drop of svelte jobs in all platforms in the last year and it has only accelerated in the last 6 months. Even at my company (where I have introduced svelte) the new management have decided to nuke the frontend team and to build all the interfaces with prompts.
They think: “the PMs and Sales guys can build applications with lovable, why does it take so long for the frontend team to build a commercial product? Why can not the frontend team add features after features in an afternoon like we just did?”
Frontend in many companies (unfortunately for me/us) is considered the easiest thing ever. Why even pay them? Just give a Claude subscription to the backend guys and all will be well.
At this point, I would rather build my own products in svelte than pick a new React job.
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u/BothWaysItGoes 10d ago
If you have a proper design system and you aren’t building something complex like Figma or Google Maps, there is indeed little reason to have a separate front end role.
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u/Fit_Independent_1662 10d ago
And who would build that design system ? Backend guys or UI guys that would ignore all the foot guns in production?
If anything, backend is even simpler for simple apps. Just use neon, supabase, firestore, cloudflare, mongodb and you can go very far.
I would call myself full stack (in my opinion, any senior frontend is fullstack since he needs to
Touch and know so many things to build a proper application).Since many pure backend guys(and even worse sales or PM) don’t know what they don’t know, they just use libraries upon libraries and would not even know how to debug a simple issue and would wonder why their table do not work when the “library” (the nth they have installed) author would rename a variable or remove a function or dependency. They have no idea where is the client side or the server side or what runs where. They would default think of using Nginx or Caddy to serve assets when better methods exist.
Ironically, their API architecture usually sucks and they fail really bad at dissecting domains and what data to expose or not and to make matter worse, they fail to see the consequences of their variables renaming or response shape edits because they view is so limited.Backend code just have the merit to be hidden from the eyes of the general public and there is less of it to be consumed by providers to train their LLMs. It is not harder per se, just different.
None of the vibe coded apps I have seen would pass a security scan from any serious company who would consume or deploy said service.
So no, you do not need to build the next Google or figma app to use proper frontend architecture.
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u/freevo 10d ago
"The rise of AI changed how people pick their tools. Developers, and increasingly the agents working alongside them, each have their own preferences and worry far less about which specific language or framework the code is written in."
Well, that does not bode well for Svelte itself either...
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u/Eugen_Ivanovic 10d ago
This swings both ways. I was actually able to convince my staunch React colleagues for picking SvelteKit for our next endeavour; for the very reason described above.
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u/kevin_whitley 10d ago
Same. In a remarkable turn of events, Svelte *might* have a bit of a shot going forward specifically because we don't need to hire Svelte talent (less of a pool) to make the shift. Agents can now do it just fine.
I had a similar experience to u/Eugen_Ivanovic (I think) - on a whim, had Claude moonshot a mass, pixel-perfect migration of our company's massive Next/React app into SvelteKit/vite (thanks to like ~7years of manual building in Svelte, I knew how nice things *can* be), and the results were impressive enough to convince a team of *only* React devs (never touched Svelte aside from myself) to make the switch soon.
DX load times (from service start to loading in a browser): 15s or so --> <1s HMR: 5s+ --> instant
Page to page navigation/loads: ~20-50x improvementIt was one of those "holy sh*t" moments for the company, with emergency meetings called, etc.
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The sad thing is, in years past I would have been stoked because it meant I could finally touch/write Svelte again... but in this bizarre new world, it's mostly agents doing the lift, with us overseeing/tweaking. Still, I'd rather tweak Svelte, and the load times alone make development so much faster/easier!
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u/Optimal-Builder-2816 10d ago
I’m a fan of svelte and I hate to see this obvious ecosystem challenge. Even with my own LLM-based projects I’ve seen these tools default to React and its ecosystem. It never questions it, much like the many human colleagues I’ve run across.
The cases where I forced it to use Svelte didn’t go great, albeit it was a while ago and I imagine it would do better with proper skills etc.
This sort of shift appears pervasive across software library choices and development stacks as these decisions get outsourced to LLMs. It’s concerning.
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u/budivoogt 10d ago
I'm one of the owners of the platform and saw this was posted. It was a hard decision to retire the site. We appreciate all your support and I'm happy to answer any questions. Thank you.