We’re trying to stabilize a wobbly house of cards by adding one more card on top.

Most engineers know the blissful feeling of starting a brand new codebase. Tabula rasa. The first few hours are pure joy - implementing core features, seeing immediate results. It works, it's fast, it's simple. It's delightful.

Fast forward a few weeks. The pace slows down. The codebase grows, frameworks pile up, dependencies quadruple.

In software engineering, we have one solution for all complexity problems - abstraction. And when that abstraction becomes too complex? We add another one on top. A pyramid of abstractions, each promising to be simpler than the last.

Our industry needs to focus on what we can remove, not what we can add.

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

As a frontend engineer, nothing has sparked my interest in years like “HTML Over The Wire”. While React and Next.js promise to solve complexity by moving code to Server Components, this is just another abstraction on our JS heap.

HTMX, Hotwire, Livewire, LiveView and similar tools take a different approach. No build process, no server components, no virtual DOM. Just back to basics: Keep logic on the backend where it scales, and send browsers what they actually need - HTML.

The house of cards gets more stable the closer you get to the table.