React has won. It's the dominant UI framework for web development, and it's not even close. React was already the preferred language by developers before the AI wave, and the rise of AI has only cemented its position. The ecosystem around React is thriving, with a huge number of libraries, tools, and resources available for developers.
But the most interesting part is not just React's dominance, but what will come after React.
AI Models Default to React
If you ask any coding agent to write a frontend app, it is almost certain that the agent will pick React as the frontend. Not only that, but I have seen agents picking Next JS (the same framework I used for this website!) as the basis for the application. This is because during training the model was exposed to all the repositories on GitHub, and React is the most popular frontend framework by a large margin. The model has learned that React is the go-to choice for frontend development, and it defaults to it when asked to generate UI code.
Last framework?
Developers will be writing less and less code with time. To be honest, Claude already writes more than 90% of my code (Dario was right) - I still have to write very specific prompts, however. With that said, there is no real need to keep developing frontend frameworks that focus on human developers, but instead, we should focus on what will be the next wave.
The next wave of frameworks might be much more agentic than we think. What does that mean? It means that the next frameworks will be designed to be used by AI agents, not human developers. They will have features that make it easier for agents to generate code, test it, and deploy it. They will also have features that make it easier for agents to understand the codebase and make changes to it. Human readable code will be more like a "nice to have".
Interesting times we live!