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Comment by jvanveen | Hacker News Reader

Besides a rewrite to another framework using AI, another option is to modernize the framework with AI instead. Personally, I started to like Mithril after having worked with it for a few years. Instead of rewriting it to a better maintained alternative (mithril doesn't have much active development going on since 2015), I used agents to add signals, proper state management, typing, ssr, computed properties, Bun tooling and more to it. Thanks to the existing test suite, changes landed quite reliably. Source: https://code.garage44.eu/jeroen/mithril

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There are also new minimalist frontend spa frameworks built from the ground up to be clean and simple and fast and easy for ai. E.g. https://arrow-js.com/

That truly looks agentic. Few commits in spring 2021 then nothing until a flurry of commits in spring of 2023, then absolutely nothing until March 2026, then we get 160 commits, and fast-forward until today, not a single change since then. https://github.com/standardagents/arrow-js/graphs/contributo...

Maybe it's just me, but if I were to start depending on other's UI frameworks again, then stability would be the first thing I'd look for, and with that I'd probably want to stay as far away from anything "agent" as I can.

Edit: I just realized that that "framework" is the same ArrowJS that used to be a "library" and the selling point was how small it was, and how it wasn't a framework (https://web.archive.org/web/20230609020338/https://www.arrow...), incredibly funny they pivoted into making it a fully fledged framework after all.

Lol. Very fair.

I also have two open issues that have no response.

But it still is by far the cleanest of the micro spa frameworks I've seen.

> the cleanest of the micro spa frameworks I've seen

Ah, you're the author of it? :P Cherry on top

> I just realized that that "framework" is the same ArrowJS that used to be a "library" and the selling point was how small it was, and how it wasn't a framework (https://web.archive.org/web/20230609020338/https://www.arrow...), incredibly funny they pivoted into making it a fully fledged framework after all.

Hahaha, speedrunning the "remember how React used to be a library (not a framework) before it became overloaded with pointless bloat? my new sleek, simple library (not a framework) does the bare minimum, and will never do anything more" trail blazed by hundreds of would-be React killers over the years... but with AI this time.

Yeah it's really enjoyable to be able to take old, stale dependencies, and simply make them into something great, typesafe, ESM, well tested etc, without having to change the whole codebase.

I did this recently with a dependency that has stalled out. For the past 3-4 years, the ngx-infinite-scroller has been in maintenance mode of just updating the Angular version. Then the maintainer (which is a fork of a fork of the original) disappeared.

I forked, put AI on it to not only fix the issue I was facing with the new Angular (zoneless) but add full testing to it and make it resilient. Massive benefit to my apps and trust.

https://github.com/Kareadita/ngx-virtual-scroller for anyone that's interested.

Yes, Mithril enhanced with signals feels very efficient und saves tokens.

Which library do you use to get signals?

Yes, mithril is beautiful. I believe people consider it complete mostly, that's why there have not been updates. I have been doing the same and adding a bunch of features on top. Will check yours. Let's make super-mithril !

Big Mithril fan here - going to check this out!

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