Note · 2026-09-04 09:52

No one is defending your stack. Ryan Carniato, the creator of the frontend JavaScript framework SolidJS, recently published an article titled “No One is Defending Your Stack.”

He laments (or perhaps complains) that since the rise of AI, everyone has been migrating to mainstream tech stacks.

Both Cursor’s main site and Anthropic’s documentation site migrated from SolidJS to React. As the founder of SolidJS, this was hard for him to swallow.

“My initial reaction wasn’t good. Years of my life’s work became the poster child for what people wanted to move away from. And it was in the same week we shipped the biggest release in the project’s history. It hurt, I can’t deny that.”

He argues that migrating tech stacks is a costly and risky undertaking. In the past, few dared to do it. But now, AI can rewrite code, making migrations easier. As a result, management teams are increasingly recommending shifts toward mainstream stacks.

Other examples include Cognition’s marketing website migrating from Astro to Next.js, and Bun migrating from Zig to Rust.

Without extensive deliberation or years of evaluation, perhaps just a single company meeting can lead to abandoning the current stack in favor of a more popular one.

No one defends the existing stack anymore—everyone rushes to embrace “best practices.”

His conclusion: “At this rate, barring a few exceptions, every layer will eventually converge to the most popular solution of the moment. Frontend gravitates toward React, systems toward Rust, scripting toward Python, and even the framework itself toward Next.js—completely disregarding fit.”

He believes that AI tends to favor the most popular technologies, leaving niche tools ignored. Over time, the software ecosystem will homogenize, and diversity will cease to exist.

So we must ask: without the soil for diversity, and without sufficient experimentation and trial-and-error, where will the next innovation in the software ecosystem come from? Or does AI-driven development simply not care about innovation, as long as the generated code runs?