One of my pet peeves with the web development community is that so many of the decisions we make are vibes-based. Frameworks are “blazing fast,” tools will “supercharge” your development, the right abstraction will benefit both you and your users (DX and UX all in one!). All of this breathless boasting is usually offered with zero evidence. Alex Russell has called this “frontend’s lost decade”, Baldur Bjarnason has called programming a pop culture, and I’ve tried to counter this trend in my blog with facts and benchmarks (at my best, anyway).

For a long time it seemed like our community’s allergy to evidence was driven by the desire for greater DX. In other words, devs just liked the way it felt to type JSX in React, and the arguments promoting React or related tools (“the virtual DOM is fast!”) were largely post-hoc rationalizations to justify those initial gut feelings. (Jonathan Haidt would likely agree with this assessment.)

But in the agentic era, when developers are no longer typing code by hand and are thus less constrained by DX, I still see vibes ruling the day (and not just in the sense of “vibe-coding”). Frontends are rewritten because some framework or another is “better for agents.” (Did anyone think to ask the agents?) The resulting code is “faster,” the agents make “fewer mistakes,” etc. Once again, these claims are often made without evidence. Whenever I read one of these accounts, I think to myself, “Where are the benchmarks?”