I don't use React for my side-projects
On 21 January 2026 by Dmytro Kondakov
My daily work driver is React, but I don’t use it for personal projects. Or Vue, or Svelte, or any frontend framework, really.
I’m tired of following the latest trends and tools for my side projects. I’ve spent more time reading docs and trying things than actually shipping. I’ve found that Claude Code is extremely good at working with raw HTML and simple Bun servers, so I can build things fast and use fewer tokens.
If you click Inspect on this website, you’ll find bare-bones HTML files. They’re not bundled, and I don’t have any kind of build process to serve them.
I also love the aesthetic of making pure HTML websites in 2026.
Most web traffic now comes from LLMs scraping content. They don’t care about styling or animations. They just want the text. I think most of the future web will be 90% raw HTML sites, and the other 10% will be carefully crafted, beautiful experiences (which I’m obviously not going for here). But well-designed minimalist websites are dead, as far as I’m concerned.
My only styling decision was using the Arial font.
I was looking for something to replace Inter, and remembered Are.na uses Arial (well, a variation of it), and it looks great. It’s already on every device, requires no loading, and has a neat, utilitarian vibe.
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